Does America simply lack the political will to face economic reality? In the teeth of the Depression, Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon famously told President Herbert Hoover to “liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate”—in other words, to resist bailing out any industry through state intervention. This was a
“Today the tenets of this nineteenth-century philosophy of liberalism are almost forgotten. In the United States “liberal” means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations.” —Ludwig von Mises, 1962 (emphasis added) F.A. Hayek is back in the public
David French, maybe National Review ’s most reliably wrong scribe, issued this gem in response to the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s residence in Florida: Imagine thinking federal police agents and lawyers will be “held accountable,” or that presidents are not above the law! Is this an afterschool special? “Let’s wait and see, folks, before we judge
Is Babbittry alive and well in twenty-first-century America? George F. Babbitt is novelist Sinclair Lewis’s protagonist in the novel of the same name. Babbitt is a real estate man, which is to say a salesman, but the newfangled 1920s term is “Realtor ™. “ Incurious, smug, self-satisfied, and utterly predictable, Babbitt is well pleased with his
Some of you may know the name Alex Berenson, the former New York Times journalist who comes from a left-liberal background. He has been absolutely fearless and tireless on Twitter over the past eighteen months, documenting the overreach and folly of covid policy—and the mixed reality behind official assurances on everything from social
Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. The GameStop saga shows some “equity” movements are more equal than others. Stakeholder theory , the corporate version of social justice, attempts to install this hopelessly amorphous concept of “equity” in the business world. Equity, unlike equality, demands different treatment of
“To mount an effective response to the reigning egalitarianism of our age, therefore, it is necessary but scarcely sufficient to demonstrate the absurdity, the anti-scientific nature, the self-contradictory nature, of the egalitarian doctrine, as well as the disastrous consequences of the egalitarian program. All this is well and good. But it
You do not defend a world that is already lost. When was it lost? That you cannot say precisely. It is a point for the revolutionary historian to ponder. We know only that it was surrendered peacefully, without a struggle, almost unawares. There was no day, no hour, no celebration of the event—and yet definitely, the ultimate power of initiative
Enough is enough. It is time to stop wearing masks, or at the very least to eliminate mask mandates in all settings. This is especially urgent for children in schools and universities, who suffer the effects of masks for long hours each day despite being at exceedingly low risk for death or serious illness from covid. We have a responsibility,
Inflation in the US is at forty-year highs, while interest rates on ten-year Treasury notes just hit 3 percent—signaling trouble for home buyers. Truck drivers pay more than $1,000 to fill their rigs with $5 per gallon diesel to deliver your increasingly expensive groceries and Amazon packages. Crime and homelessness skyrocket in large cities,
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.