[ Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939 . By Wolfgang Schivelbusch. Metropolitan Books, 2006. 242 pgs.] Critics of Roosevelt’s New Deal often liken it to fascism. Roosevelt’s numerous defenders dismiss this charge as reactionary propaganda; but as Wolfgang Schivelbusch makes clear,
Human Scale Revisited: A New Look at the Classic Case for a Decentralist Future Kirkpatrick Sale Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017 411 pages What attitude should supporters of the free market take toward decentralization? Should libertarians support the movement for Catalonian autonomy, for example, even if leaders of that movement are unfriendly
Pope Francis and Ludwig von Mises do not see eye-to-eye on the value of consumer choice. The Pope condemns what Mises defends, and their disagreement goes beyond the obvious. As everyone knows, the Pope condemns what he calls “consumerism.” In a speech delivered in 2015, for example, he said: “Today consumerism determines what is important.
Today is Hans Hoppe’s birthday. He is an outstanding libertarian theorist, in the tradition of Murray Rothbard, and his strikingly original work ranges widely over philosophy, history, and economics. Among his many contributions are a defense of self-ownership and property rights through argumentation ethics and a trenchant criticism of
A recent article in American Affairs by Cass Sunstein illustrates a cast of mind that poses a great danger. Sunstein is a legal academic, well-known for his work in behavioral economics. In his book Nudge , written with Richard Thaler, he informed us of the benefits of having experts like him “nudge” us into making choices that they regard as good
Walter Block has reached an amazing milestone. He is dedicated to his students, and I have often marveled at the way students throng around him whenever he is at Mises University. He is also one of the most prolific economists of our time. He often co-authors papers with students, and these now number 100 peer-reviewed contributions. For anyone
Eric Posner and Gen Weyl claim that economics has become too timid. Posner is an influential law professor at Chicago, and Weyl is a principal researcher at Microsoft. Their article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education on May 6. Their diagnosis of economics is accurate, but their cure is worse than the disease. Economists today, they say,
The Secular Saints: And Why Morals Are Not Just Subjective . By Hunter Lewis. Axios Press, 2018. Vi + 435 pages. Hunter Lewis has set himself a difficult task: he endeavors to explain why morals are not subjective. To understand his project, we must understand what Lewis means by “subjective” and its contrasting term “objective.” Consider the two
Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life Nassim Nicholas Taleb Random House, 2018 To review Skin in the Game is a risky undertaking. The author has little use for book reviewers who, he tells us, “are bad middlemen. Book reviews are judged according to how plausible and well-written they are; never in how they map the book (unless of
Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian Harvard University Press, 2018 x+381 pages Quinn Slobodian, a historian at Wellesley College, tells us that Globalists “is a long-simmering product of the Seattle protests against the World Trade organization in 1999. I was part of a generation that ... became
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.