The Free Market 14, no. 9 (September 1996) In a state-funded education system, bad ideas live longer than they would in a free market. That’s the best explanation for the staying power of the two opposing errors of our time: nihilism and pseudo-omniscience in the social sciences. Nihilism comes in the form of postmodernism, a pretentious body of
The Free Market 15, no. 9 (September 1997) Academia has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. Take a look at the recent book catalog of Duke University Press, once a prestigious publishing house. Today it features third-rate, race-obsessed, sex-obsessed, solipsistic tirades masquerading as scholarship. Let’s take a peek. In
35 years ago, I was worried. I was working at a free-market think tank at a university, and I could see that Austrian economics was becoming less and less influential. Who would speak for untrammeled freedom and capitalism? Sound money and no central banking? Would economics entirely betray its great advocates of liberty from Menger to Mises, in
The Free Market 24, no. 5 (May 2004) I am often asked about career paths for freedom lovers. How can one combine professional life with the advancement of liberty? Let’s admit at the outset that it is presumptuous to offer any answer since all jobs and careers in the market economy are subject to the forces of the division of labor. Because a
The Free Market 24, no. 8 (August 2004) At our conferences and programs, the students who attend are the first to have been educated in the age of information. Nearly all the students now attending were born on or after the year of our founding (1982). The Mises Institute went online in 1995, about the time that web browsers were becoming more
The Free Market 26, no. 4 (April 2005) Our image of Svengali derives from a 1894 novel by George Du Maurier (Trilby) that tells of a hypnotist who exercised psychological power over a woman. Insofar as Svengali is in control, she can sing beautifully. But when he is not around, she is reduced to barely functioning at all. Svengali himself
The Free Market 26, no. 10 (October 2005) T he Mises Institute has worked for more than two decades to advance one purpose: the cause of economic freedom in academia and public life. The two comments on our work that I hear most often are: (1) you guys are doing a great job, and (2) it is not working. On the first point, I can only thank
In American culture, public schools are praised in public and criticized in private, which is roughly the opposite of how we tend to treat large-scale enterprises like Walmart. In public, everyone says that Walmart is awful, filled with shoddy foreign products and exploiting workers. But in private, we buy the well-priced, quality goods, and long
Mises.org.br Mises often said that ideas are more powerful than armies. In the midst of war — and all governments are, to some extent, at war with their own people — it can take a leap of faith to agree. But if you step back and look at the progress that the ideas of liberty are making, it is easy to believe that what Mises said was exactly right.
Not too long ago, the myth of Lincoln was accepted everywhere. The Greatest President, the Savior of the Union, the you get the idea. His true role — as dictator, the launcher of a horrific and unnecessary war (other countries abolished slavery peacefully), an inflationist and pioneer of the income and inheritance taxes, a centralizer, a police
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.