Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II by Sean McMeekin Basic Books, 2021 831 pp. Probably the dominant mainstream view of World War II goes like this. World War II was the “good war.” Though Joseph Stalin was guilty of many crimes, Adolf Hitler, with his vast conquests accompanied by mass murder on a colossal scale, was an immediate threat
Rigged! How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections by Mollie Hemingway Regnery Publishing, 2021, 432 pp. Mollie Hemingway, an editor of the online magazine The Federalist , calls our attention in this well-researched book to a problem of vital significance. She is a supporter of Donald Trump, though not an uncritical one, and
No Free Lunch: Six Economic Lies You’ve Been Taught and Probably Believe by Caleb S. Fuller Freiling Publishing, 2021. 110 pp. Caleb Fuller, an economist who teaches at Grove City College, thinks that many people have a mistaken conception of economics. It is, they think, a dull and dry subject, the “dismal science,” of primary interest to
Why Does Inequality Matter? by T.M. Scanlon Oxford University Press, 2018, 170 pp. T.M. Scanlon, who taught philosophy for many years at Princeton and Harvard, is one of the leading moral and political philosophers of the past fifty years or so. Though far from a libertarian, he takes libertarian views with great seriousness and has endeavored to
Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2020 By Thomas Piketty Yale University Press, 2021 352 pages Thomas Piketty has written a useful book. Readers need no longer plough their way through his vast Capital in the Twenty-First Century , not to mention his even vaster Capital and Ideology, to understand his message. This fairly
Capitalism vs. Freedom: The Toll Road to Serfdom by Rob Larson Zero Books, 2018, 233 pp. Rob Larson, who is a professor of economics at Tacoma Community College in Washington, does not agree with Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, and Friedman that the free market promotes freedom and prosperity and that socialism is the “road to serfdom.” That is an
Cronyism: Liberty versus Power in Early America, 1607–1849 by Patrick Newman Mises Institute, 2021, 362 pp. Patrick Newman dedicates Cronyism to Murray Rothbard, and it is a fitting choice, as this outstanding book continues and extends Rothbard’s brilliant interpretation of American history. Newman is eminently qualified to do so, having edited
Crisis of the Two Constitutions: The Rise, Decline, and Recovery of American Greatness by Charles R. Kesler Encounter Books, 2021 xviii + 451 pp. Charles Kesler, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and editor of the Claremont Review of Books , has presented in this important new book a carefully conceived interpretation of the
Raghuram Rajan has written a surprising book. Now teaching finance at the University of Chicago, he is an international bureaucrat in good standing, and not a minor one at that; he was chief economist of the International Monetary Fund. Yet far from calling for an increase in “global governance,” as one might expect from someone with his
Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden University of Chicago Press, 2020 xvii + 227 pages McCloskey and Carden endeavor to explain one of the most striking facts of world history. Since about 1800, there has been an enormous increase in the average standard of
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.