This is a pretty good measure of how far we have come in America in our understanding of freedom from that of the founders: Bill Clinton awarded the “Medal of Freedom” to John Kenneth Galbraith on August 9, 2000, despite the fact that Galbraith has been a stalwart champion of the very opposite idea of freedom from that laid out by those founders.
[The following article appeared in the Investors Business Daily , Wednesday, January 12, 2000] Adam Smith is widely regarded as the father of modern economics. But he wasn’t. The real founder may be someone most people have never heard of. More than 40 years before Adam Smith wrote “The Wealth of Nations,” Richard Cantillon authored the “Essai sur
As a senior in high school, back in 1977, I was introduced to the writings of Ayn Rand. Rand’s work had a huge impact on my intellectual development. That impact was not merely philosophical. In her essays, Rand celebrated the enormous contributions of the Austrian school. Not too long thereafter, I discovered such thinkers as Ludwig von Mises, F.
The Free Market 18, no. 1 (January 2000) “The trouble with socialism,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, “is that it takes too many evenings.” Indeed, the private lives of socialists are highly politicized. They must not be interested in anything-not even their families-other than socialism. The theory must inform every aspect of their lives, which must
The Free Market 18, no. 2 (February 2000) At the end of the century, Bill Clinton declared Franklin D. Roosevelt the “man of the century” for having “saved capitalism,” echoing the gushing praise that Newt Gingrich has heaped on FDR, calling him “the greatest figure of the twentieth century.” The greatest phony of the twentieth century would be
A Case of Myth Taking Identity Mises Review 6, No. 1 (Spring 2000) JOHN STUART MILL ON LIBERTY AND CONTROL Joseph Hamburger Princeton University Press, 1999, xx + 239 pgs. As usual Murray Rothbard was right. In his Classical Economics, he contrasts John Stuart Mill with his father James Mill: “Instead of possessing a hard-nosed cadre intellect,
The Truth-Splitter Mises Review 6, No. 4 (Winter 2000) FORCED INTO GLORY: ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S WHITE DREAM Lerone Bennett, Jr. Johnson Publishing, 2000; xv + 651 pgs. The Swiss scholar Eduard Fueter once observed that every historian must decide whether he wishes to write from the perspective of his own time, or from the perspective of those whom
Beyond some rudimentary facts, very little is available in English about the life of J.B. Say. He was born in Lyons, France, to middle-class Huguenot parents, and spent most of his early years in Geneva and London. As a young man, he returned to France in the employ of a life insurance company, and soon became an influential member of a group of
“Every theory must ultimately meet two tests: one, that of internal consistency, the other that of consistency with reality.” Introduction In the period between the founders of the Austrian school (Menger, Böhm-Bawerk, and Wieser) and its next generation (led by Mises and Hayek), Frank Albert Fetter was the standard bearer of the Austrian
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? by Richard P. Feynman, as told to Ralph Leighton W. W. Norton & Company, 1985 and 1988. 346 and 248 pgs. Second to deciding which CD or book to take to a desert island, perhaps the most popular mental exercise is to select the single person from all of human history
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.