The philosopher Michael Huemer is usually favorable to the free market, and he is also a strong defender of anarchism. Although I disagree with some of the arguments in his defense of anarchism, The Problem of Political Authority , it is an excellent book. In a recent blog post , he surprisingly suggests that taxation may in some cases be
The collapse of the American-backed state in Afghanistan brings home the wisdom of Murray Rothbard’s essay “The Death of a State,” written in July 1975. The lessons that Rothbard drew from the fall of South Vietnam apply equally to the present crisis. Among these were the importance of guerilla warfare, the dependence of all states on majority
Roger Crisp is a well-regarded philosopher and has written important books on ethical theory and its history with a concentration on the British utilitarians. But in an article that appeared in the New Statesman on August 10, he presents one of the strangest arguments I’ve ever read. Crisp asks us to imagine that an asteroid is about to hit the
Today is Walter Block’s 80 th birthday. The title of most famous book, Defending the Undefendable , best captures his way of looking at the world. He will take a libertarian principle and deduce consequences from it with iron consistency, often using imaginative examples while doing so. You may think he is wrong, but you will find it more
Stalin’s War: A New History of World War II by Sean McMeekin Basic Books, 2021 831 pp. Probably the dominant mainstream view of World War II goes like this. World War II was the “good war.” Though Joseph Stalin was guilty of many crimes, Adolf Hitler, with his vast conquests accompanied by mass murder on a colossal scale, was an immediate threat
Some economists are good at political philosophy as well. Mises and Rothbard of course come to mind, but the good philosophers aren’t confined to Austrian school economists. Amartya Sen and Kenneth Arrow know what they are talking about when it comes to philosophy, agree with them or not. But some eminent economists don’t, and, judging by Nicholas
Last week, I discussed the way in which Patrick Deneen misreads John Stuart Mill in his book Regime Change . I’d like to continue the assault on Regime Change this week by looking at an argument he makes against libertarianism. Libertarians, Deneen alleges, are elitists. They think that ordinary people need to be ruled by an elite class of
The Political Economy of Distributism: Property, Liberty, and the Common Good by Alexander William Salter Catholic University of America Press, 2023; xiii + 238 pp. Distributism attracted considerable attention during the 1920s and ’30s among people who wished to apply Catholic social teaching to the modern capitalist economy, and it has recently
[ Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong, Basic Books, 2022 viii + 605 pp.] J. Bradford DeLong, who teaches economics at UC Berkeley and was a protégé of Larry Summer’s dislikes Austrian economics, which he sometimes assails on his blog. You might reasonably expect that for this reason, I will
Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World without Democracy by Quinn Slobodian Metropolitan Books, 2023; 336 pp. Quinn Slobodian, a professor of the history of ideas at Wellesley College, has a good deal to say about Murray Rothbard, and I have attempted to respond to that in a review that is to be published in the next issue
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.