Free-market advocates are clear about what should be done about government services and operations: they should be privatized. While there is considerable confusion about how the process should be accomplished, the goal is crystal-clear. But apart from trying to speed up privatization, and also forcing that process indirectly by slashing the
[From Anatomy of the State (1974).] Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article . The State is almost universally considered an institution of social service. Some theorists venerate the State as the apotheosis of society; others regard it as an amiable, though often inefficient, organization for achieving social ends; but almost all
One vexing current problem centers on who becomes the citizen of a given country, since citizenship confers voting rights. The Anglo-American model, in which every baby born in the country’s land area automatically becomes a citizen, clearly invites welfare immigration by expectant parents. In the U.S., for example, a current problem is illegal
[From the Rothbard Archive, originally published in The New York Times , September 4, 1971.] On Aug. 15, 1971, fascism came to America. And everyone cheered, hailing the fact that a “strong President” was once again at the helm. The word fascism is scarcely an exaggeration to describe the New Economic Policy. The trend had been there for years,
The recent rioting and virtual civil war in Northern Ireland points out, both for libertarians and for the world at large, the vital importance of pushing for and attaining the goal of national liberation for all oppressed people. Aside from being a necessary condition to the achievement of justice, national liberation is the only solution to the
If men were like ants, there would be no interest in human freedom. If individual men, like ants, were uniform, interchangeable, devoid of specific personality traits of their own, then who would care whether they were free or not? Who, indeed, would care if they lived or died? The glory of the human race is the uniqueness of each individual, the
In the 20th century, the advocates of free-market economics almost invariably pin the blame for government intervention solely on erroneous ideas — that is, on incorrect ideas about which policies will advance the public weal. To most of these writers, any such concept as “ruling class” sounds impossibly Marxist. In short, what they are really
The following points of desocialization must necessarily be written or read sequentially, but they need not be carried out in that manner: all the following points could, and should, be instituted immediately and all at once. Legalize the Black Market The first two planks are implicit in the previous part of this paper. One, is to legalize the
[Excerpted from Murray Rothbard, The Progressive Era , Patrick Newman, ed. (Auburn, Al.: Mises Institute, 2016), chap. 11.] The Rockefellers and their intellectual and technocratic entourage were, indeed, central to the New Deal. In a deep sense, in fact, the New Deal itself constituted a radical displacement of the Morgans, who had dominated the
Was Keynes, as Hayek maintained, a “brilliant scholar”? “Scholar” hardly, since Keynes was abysmally read in the economics literature: he was more of a buccaneer, taking a little bit of knowledge and using it to inflict his personality and fallacious ideas upon the world, with a drive continually fueled by an arrogance bordering on egomania. But
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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.