The Murray N. Rothbard Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Helio Beltrão. Presented at the Austrian Economics Research Conference at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on 23 March
The world has been plagued with periodic bouts of the economic rollercoaster of booms and busts, inflations and recessions, especially during the last one hundred years. The main culprits responsible for these destabilizing and disruptive episodes have been governments and their central banks. They have monopolized the control of their respective
By many objective signs and indicators the world is becoming a far more materially comfortable place. Over the last thirty years, tens of millions of people have been raised out of poverty in various parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. At the same time, new technologies have been transforming communications and conveniences of everyday life.
One day in 1927 Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, stood at the window of his office at the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, and looked out over the Ringstrasse (the main grand boulevard that encircles the center of Vienna). He said to his young friend and former student, Fritz Machlup, “Maybe grass will grow there, because our civilization will
In following the daily news events both in the United States and around the rest of the world, it is easy to get lost in the detail and not step back once and awhile and remind ourselves what the really important issues are. Under the anxiety of a possible nuclear war in Korea, actual terrorist attacks in the Middle East and by seemingly “lone
In the Bible it says, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone . . .” It also has been said that the one who strikes the second blow starts any fight. If the world is to avoid trade wars due to tariffs being imposed by the Trump Administration, both the United States and its trading partners in Europe and North America should
A specter continues to haunt the world, the specter of Karl Marx. Two hundred years ago, on May 5, 1818, the father of twentieth century totalitarian communism, the guidebook writer of revolutionary mass-murdering dictatorship, and the inspirer of disastrous socialist central planning was born in Trier, Germany. Looking over the political and
(The photo below) Friedrich A. Hayek arriving for one of the morning sessions at the second Austrian Economics conference at the University of Hartford in June 1975. The conference was sponsored by the Institute for Humane Studies, with Don Armentano as the conference director. Toward the end of the week, Hayek was called away for a phone call
Looking to the next few years ahead, is America and the world going to continue riding a wave of economic growth, improving standards of living, falling and lower unemployment, and technological changes that will continue to raise the quality and variety of life? Or will this turn out to be, at least partly, an artificial economic boom that will
Fifty years separate us, now, from 1968 and the two momentous legacies of the then soon to ending failed presidency of Lyndon Johnson: The declaring of war on America’s supposed domestic ills in the form of the “Great Society” programs, and the aggressive military intervention in a real war in Vietnam. Both of these “wars” reflected the arrogance
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.