The warning lights on the dashboard of your car suddenly light up. You naturally take it to a mechanic to diagnose and repair. Cars are complex. You don’t have the time or accumulated expertise to figure out what is happening or to fix it. We rely on experts daily. In a complex world filled with busy people, it is impossible for any one person to
At a White House summit tomorrow, President Joe Biden will repeat his proclamation of a goal to end hunger in America by 2030. In 1969, President Richard Nixon promised to end hunger at a similar White House summit. The vast expansion of federal food assistance after Nixon’s pledge failed to end the problem, but that won’t deter Biden from
Should young people go to college? Should parents, grandparents, and teachers urge them to go to college? These are now open questions. Perhaps we should ask whether they “still” should go to college. Not too long ago, the default answer was a resounding yes . College was not only the path to higher earnings, but the gateway to status :
Hope is in short supply these days, while despair and hate are enjoying an enormous surplus. To give an example, there are currently two types of stories that fill my news feed. The first are about politics and the perpetual horrors it unleashes on the world: there’s a new scandal every day, and war, protectionism, and nationalism are on the rise,
“Uneducated” is the favorite insult and excuse of the political left. In the past year alone, for example, a lack of education among voters has been used to explain each of the left’s electoral failures, as well as to dismiss criticisms of its people, policies, and institutions. These defenses are dubious to say the least. Yet setting aside the
[Reprinted from the Lara-Murphy Report , February 2017.] LARA-MURPHY REPORT: How did you become interested in Austrian economics? JEFF DEIST: Fortunately Austrian economics became interested in me, through two happy developments. First, my father had a tattered paperback copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom on his bookshelf when I was a teenager.
[ From a talk delivered at the Boston Mises Circle , October 1, 2016. ] A journalist from the Chronicle of Higher Education contacted me recently asking about free-market think tanks affiliated with universities. Can the Mises Institute or other organizations produce the scientific foundation for what he sees as an increasing faith among
[Jeff Deist’s comments at the 2016 Mises Supporters Summit in Asheville, North Carolina, September 16.] Before we hear from Judge Napolitano, I’d like to speak briefly tonight about where we are as a society, and what role the Mises Institute plays, or ought to play, in that society. Most of the country is caught up in the presidential election,
Libertarians enjoy accusing each other of blind devotion to their favorite ideas and thinkers. In fact, it almost seems like a major pastime in the liberty movement to make this charge, and to revel with others in self-congratulatory “gotcha!” moments directed toward members of the outgroup. I find this state of affairs frustrating, all the more
Writing this week for Bloomberg , Tyler Cowan made the case that Brazil is “still the country of the future.” While I share Cowan’s optimism for the nation’s future, his focus on the country’s diversity, size, and vaguely federalized political structure overlooks the real story – that Austrian economics and libertarianism is winning the battle 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.