The Washington Post is astonished (and outraged) to encounter a libertarian. Writes Libby Copeland: “Republican Ron Paul missed out on the 19th century, but he admires it from afar. He speaks lovingly of the good old days before things like Social Security and Medicaid existed, before the federal government outlawed drugs like heroin.” Those are
Everyone interested in ideas has surely had the following experience. You become curious about a certain topic. You start with periodicals, read a bit more deeply, become engaged more broadly and start to buy and check out book after book. Pretty soon you have a good-sized library developing. You speak the language. You know the players. You apply
Why do we keep falling for this? Once in every second-term presidency, the chief executive lectures the country about the impending disaster of a shortage of mathematicians and scientists. People think: oh no, we’d better get on the stick and create some in a hurry! Thus does the President want to spend $50 billion over 10 years — a figure these
If you say that government is too big and truly overweening, you elicit a surprising degree of agreement among people, even mainstream columnists, economists, and nearly everyone. Even government employees, who famously resent their bosses, might be quick to agree. If you hang outside the offices of the IRS in Washington, D.C., in the park at
Here is a book review of no particular book but rather a class of books that has been the ruling genre in conservative nonfiction for fifty years. Actually we can include blogs in this too, since thousands upon thousands partake of the same error. This critique applies the nearly every tract written from the Right from Barry Goldwater’s Conscience
Americans can only be mystified by the protests that rocked France and led to a cave in by the government. A small economic reform that would have meant the start of much-need liberalization has been repealed. The change in labor law would have permitted employers to fire workers, age 25 years or younger, in the first two years of employment. On
I talked to people all the time who think that the Mises Institute is all worked up in a frenzy over nothing. After all, we are free to speak our minds, and no one is arrested for expressing opinions not held by those in charge of the government. You can persuasively argue that the US economy is the most prosperous in the history of the world, and
Jacob Heilbrunn, writing in the Washington Monthly , uses various criticisms that leading conservatives have made of Bush to proclaim a new “conservative crackup.” In the course of his narrative, he rehearses the same old ho-hum history of postwar American conservatism, tells the same old story of how intriguing it is that conservatives are upset
This is the foreword to a forthcoming collection of Critical Essays of Walter Block’s, assembled by Glavan Bogdan of Libertas Publishers in Bucharest, Romania. Murray Rothbard, in his life, was known as Mr. Libertarian. We can make a solid case that the title now belongs to Walter Block , a student of Rothbard’s whose own vita is as thick as a
As Microsoft prepares for the new release of the new version of its browser, Google is grousing about one of Microsoft’s marketing strategies. Internet Explorer E7 will likely have a little search bar in the upper right hand corner of the browser, just as Safari and Firefox do now. With it you will be able to access a number of search engines. As
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.