In “Liberty and Property,” Mises demonstrates how poverty, starvation, disease, and serfdom dominated the pre-capitalist ages, and how the market brought liberation for the masses of men. Socialism, in contrast, embodies hatred for liberty and prosperity. In “Middle-of-the-Road Policy,” Mises lays out his theory that interventionism breeds on
Hayek was not only a seminal thinker in his own right. As a critic, commentator, guide, and teacher of ideas in general, he was a master of the history of ideas in general. This volume collects his writings on the ideas of others, and through his commentary we learn of the depth of Hayek’s own perspective. Here we have several important
It is conventional wisdom that alcohol prohibition failed, but the economic reasons for this failure have never been as extensively detailed or analyzed as they are in this study by Mark Thornton. The lessons he draws apply not only to the period of alcohol prohibition but also to drug prohibition and any other government attempt to control
Volume 12, Number 3 (Summer 1991) AEN: Throughout your career as an economist, you have shown interest in social ethics. YEAGER: I don’t see anything peculiar about economists being interested in ethics. The two fields overlap. Both are concerned with how people can function together in society without central direction. Somehow, they pursue
The Free Market 9, no. 1 (January 1991) Project Head Start is supposed to be the exception to the Great Society rule - a welfare program that actually works. David Broder of the Washington Post calls it “the most effective anti-crime and anti-drug program in the nation.” Sen. Edward Kennedy says we should model a “Marshall Plan” in “early
The Free Market 9, no. 1 (January 1991) Certain ways of talking take on a life of their own. In the rituals of habitual speech we sometimes literally forget what we are talking about. We use words in socially plausible patterns but lose the faculty of connecting them with experience. This failing may come from simple mental indolence or from the
The Free Market 9, no. 2 (February 1991) In 1928 Herbert Hoover rode the coattails of Calvin Coolidge into the White House, and everyone thought he would hold the line on taxes, for he talked of “individual freedom” and criticized his opponents as “socialists.” Despite his public rhetoric, however, Hoover was· a believer in the “new economics”
The Free Market 9, no. 3 (March 1991) There has been a veritable revolution in the attitude of the nation’s economists, as well as the public, toward our banking system. Ever since 1933, it was a stem dogma—a virtual article of faith—among economic textbooks, financial writers, and all establishment economists from Keynesians to Milton Friedman,
The Free Market 9, no. 4 (April 1991) Few occurrences have been more dreaded and reviled in the ‘history of economic thought than deflation. Even as perceptive a hardmoney theorist as Ricardo was unduly leery of deflation, and a positive phobia about falling prices has been central to both Keynesian and monetarist thought. Both the inflationary
The Free Market 9, no. 5 (May 1991) Governments have always intervened in the economy, but today’s State—armed with modern data collection as well as an interventionist ideology—has taken us to a new level of regulation and taxation. Faced with this, people find less costly ways to work, produce, and exchange, even if it means doing so
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.