Auburn, Alabama, is featured on the front cover of today’s Wall Street Journal . I was interviewed extensively for the story, but was not mentioned. The story is about the relationship between state universities and increased manufacturing jobs. It turns out that my input did not fit into the story. The thesis of the article was that college
“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
... the [commencement] message is that it is morally superior to be in organizations consuming output produced by others than to be in organizations which produce that output. — Thomas Sowell We teach in a millennium where our junior, senior, and graduate students come to us indoctrinated to loathe the evil of capitalism, pursuing their education
“Our greatest enemy today, in short, is the economic illiteracy and confusion on the part of those who insist on “planning,” “stabilizing,” and straitjacketing the economy and who have the political power to do it.” So wrote Henry Hazlitt in 1946 , words that sadly retain their relevancy today. The consequences of this pervasive fallacy takes many
Economics, as we have now seen again and again, is a science of recognizing secondary consequences. It is also a science of seeing general consequences. It is the science of tracing the effects of some proposed or existing policy not only on some special interest in the short run, but on the general interest in the long run . This is the lesson
It’s easy to get discouraged in the Age of Obama, a man who can say, in Castro’s Cuba, that there is not much difference between communism and capitalism. And in his warped mind, I guess it’s sort of true, since his program is a mixture. That is, it’s fascist. Combine his corporatism with envy, perpetual war, negative interest rates, the police
I enjoyed listening to Theral Timpson’s podcast interview of Jason Hoyt yesterday. Hoyt is the co-founder of Peer J , an open access publisher that is also encouraging biologists to post pre-prints . Peer J offer pre-print hosting for free and is one of those entrepreneurial companies that is trying to find a remedy for the widely perceived
A quarter of a century after the spectacular collapse of socialism in the Soviet empire, a large segment of the “millennial” generation (those born between 1982 and 2004) thinks socialism should be the wave of their future. A 2016 Pew Foundation poll found that 69 percent of voters under the age of 30 expressed “a willingness to vote for a
[ 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
Americans have more disposable income than nearly every other country on earth. The few exceptions include a handful of northern Western European states and some small city states like Monaco. Even when accounting for government benefits and taxes, Americans still have more income available to spend than almost anyone else. As this measure from
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.