Paul Krugman in End This Depression Now! and elsewhere uses a story about a babysitting cooperative near Washington, D.C., to illustrate how Keynesian stimulus policies work. Each of the families in the cooperative needed a babysitter if it wanted to go out for an evening. Every family was given a certain amount of scrip, each unit of which was
[ From The Daily Bell , March 2, 2014 ] Introduction: Mark Thornton is Senior Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, with articles published often in the Mises Daily . He serves as the Book Review Editor of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics and was a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Libertarian Studies . He has
Mises and Rothbard taught that economics is a value-free science. Propositions of economics, such as the law of diminishing marginal utility, neither state nor imply any judgments about what is good or bad, right or wrong. Robert Grant, an Irish philosopher who teaches at Trinity College, Dublin, disagrees. In an article that appeared January 23
Harry Binswanger, a leading Objectivist philosopher, advances a simple argument that he thinks suffices to undermine libertarian anarchism. The argument is found in his article of January 24 for Forbes, “Sorry, Libertarian Anarchists, Capitalism Requires Government.” Binswanger’s argument starts from a correct premise. In a free market exchange,
At a recent conference on cybercrime, Judge Richard Posner, a well-known federal appeals court judge and one of the founders of the “law and economics” movement, said that the needs of national security trump a supposed right to privacy. The NSA spying programs should be allowed to proceed unimpeded by the wishes of people to keep their private
What did Israel Kirzner think of Murray Rothbard? Robert Wenzel has linked to a video interview of Kirzner that answers this question. Kirzner calls Rothbard “an extraordinarily brilliant person” and says that “genius is perhaps not too extravagant a word to use” about
Leonard Peikoff, much to my surprise, has an excellent podcast on Edward Snowden. He praises Snowden for revealing the vast amount of information the NSA collects about us. The government’s program is in essence totalitarian, and Peikoff aptly draws a parallel with Orwell’s 1984 . To those who say that Snowden gave American secrets to Russia,
By Ron Paul Earlier this month, CIA-operated drones killed as many as 55 people in Yemen in several separate strikes. Although it was claimed that those killed were “militants,” according to press reports at least three civilians were killed and at least five others wounded. That makes at least 92 US drone attacks against Yemen during the Obama
George Reisman speaks on a variety of issues , including economic inequality, income and inheritance taxes, with John O’Donnell on the Power Trading Radio show. George Reisman is economics professor emeritus from Pepperdine University. He received his Ph.D from New York University with Ludwig von Mises as his thesis advisor. He was also a close
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.