Everyone knows the rule: drink no liquor before noon. How insufferable such advice is! It has caused morning drinkers to hide their habits, deny them when confronted, and otherwise feel like they are doing something wrong or immoral or socially intolerable, a combination which leads to other forms of pathology. It is time for them to stand up and
You know why so many men walk around with sloppy hair? We hate haircuts. You have to drive there to get one, which represents decline, because if you know about Figaro from Rossini’s “Barber of Seville,” the barber came to your home (but then he also pulled out your teeth and passed on furtive notes arranging encounters of various sort, etc.). In
Part of the difficulty of understanding Mark Twain’s political outlook is due to terminology and the tendency of politics to corrupt the meaning of everything. As often as you see him called a liberal, he is called a conservative, and sometimes both in the same breath. Critics puzzle about how one person could be champion of workers, owners, and
The debate between J.M. Keynes and F.A. Hayek, both living and teaching in Britain in the 1930s , was one of the great debates of the century. Sadly, the charming globetrotter Keynes had the podium and the audience, to the point of influencing policy the world over even to the present day. Meanwhile, the quiet and studious Hayek never really did
It has been ten years since my office was last cleaned. It was like opening a time capsule — and not just because what I found was old. What I found represented a different epoch, a time when all things that mattered were subject to the law of scarcity: what one had no one else could have and therefore it was treasured and hoarded for all
Three conversations at Mises University this year gave me great encouragement and confirmed the value of the work of the Mises Institute in resurrecting any and all great literature in the Austrian/libertarian milieu. All three were conversations with students about their influences and inspirations. The first case was a student who aspired to
Who are the capitalist folk heroes of our time? The Social Network is a film that celebrates one of the greats, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. It might seem at first like an impossibly boring story that resists movie making: how Facebook came to be founded and grew, meeting trials along the way and becoming the giant that it is today. In fact,
I’ve held my peace for as long as I can, but there will be no more silence on this critical issue of the day. Here is the bottom line: you need to learn to make a link or you should fall into the grave early. There is no getting by in life without this skill. It is a bloody outrage that people continue not to know how to do this. And yet it
The Catholic Church in America in the 19th century would have never featured an American flag anywhere in sight. This trend began in World War I: the German parishes were pressured to show their loyalty to the state and its war. The trend picked up steam in World War II, when the Italians too were suspected and so had to declare their loyalty. The
In the classic and futuristic television series from 1962 to 1963 — I admit that I adore this show and could watch every episode 100 times — people work only a few hours a day, travel at 500 miles per hour in flying cars that go as fast as 2,500 miles per hour, and the main job is “pushing buttons.” The galaxy is their home. Healthcare is a
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.