Our Enemy, the Stateby Albert Jay Nock This year the theme of the Institute’s Supporters Summit was “Our Enemy, the State.” What better book review for this issue of The Misesian, then, than a discussion of Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State, first published in 1935? In what follows, I’ll talk about some of the insights in that book.Nock draws a distinction between the state and society, though sometimes he describes this distinction as between the state and government. What he means by the latter term is not altogether easy to discern, but the basic point he wants to make is clear. This is that there are two ways in which people in a community can coexist. One is by peaceful cooperation, and the other is by taking what others have produced. He calls the first

What Went Wrong with Capitalismby Ruchir SharmaSimon and Schuster, 2024; 384 pp.It is always encouraging when a non–Austrian School economist accepts through his own reasoning an essential tenet of Austrian economics. Ruchir Sharma, who is chairman of Rockefeller International, founder and chief investments officer of Breakout Capital, and a well-known economic journalist, is not an Austrian, though he is aware of Friedrich Hayek’s work. He lends strong support to the Austrian position that because competition moves resources to where they best fulfill consumer demand, the government must not interfere with this process by bailing out businesses that fail.The position just referred to is called consumer sovereignty, and Ludwig von Mises explains it in chapter 15

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.

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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.

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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.

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A Tyranny for the Good of Its Victims: The Ugly Truth about Stakeholder Capitalism. By Andrew F. Puzder. Encounter Books, 2024; xiii + 335 pp.Andrew Puzder, who is both a leading business executive—he was the CEO of a restaurant chain that owns Carl’s Jr.—and an experienced attorney, tells a dramatic tale. The free market is by far the best economic system and has made possible, since the Industrial Revolution, a historically unprecedented rate of economic growth. The free market is an economic democracy in which entrepreneurs vie to do the bidding of consumers, who, in most cases, want the most money possible. In corporations, the consumers are the corporations’ owners, the shareholders, and officers of corporations have a fiduciary duty to them.In recent

War and Individual Rights by Kai Draper; Oxford University Press, 2016, xii + 254 pp.Many people make fun of analytic philosophy because of its use of imaginary cases, often elaborated with what seems perverse ingenuity. It is better, critics claim, to stick close to reality. While there is much to be said for this, the analytic method is frequently insightful, as I’ll try to show. War and Individual Rights is the best analytic discussion of the just war, both the justification for going to war (jus ad bellum) and the conduct of war (jus in bello) that I have read, and it is all the more of interest in that Draper defends self-ownership and a Lockean account of property acquisition, albeit in a way that is less strict than the Rothbardian account. In addition,

Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. By Jason Stanley. Atria One Step Publishing, 2024; 256 pp.Jason Stanley is a well-regarded philosopher of language, but you would never realize it from this rambling and incoherent book. Stanley rightly says that control of public education is an essential characteristic of fascism. By “fascism,” I should add, he includes Nazism. He also notes that fascists wanted to restrict the curriculum so that the students would not study left-wing views, except as targets for attack. It follows from this, according to him, that if you want to exclude left-wing views from the curriculum, you are probably a Nazi.To resist fascism, he thinks, we must have public education that teaches the “correct views.”

James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent—published over sixty years ago in 1962—has been one of the most influential books that apply economic ideas to politics. The authors were by no means libertarians, but they favored, for the most part, a limited state and the free market. An additional point in their favor was that both authors read my book reviews. In this week’s column, I’m going to discuss some points of interest in the book, some of which haven’t gotten as much attention as they deserve.The authors are strong supporters of methodological individualism, and they cite Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action in defense of this view. Actions must always be traced back to individual decisions, and they reject “organic” conceptions of the state that

James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock’s The Calculus of Consent—published over sixty years ago in 1962—has been one of the most influential books that apply economic ideas to politics. The authors were by no means libertarians, but they favored, for the most part, a limited state and the free market. An additional point in their favor was that both authors read my book reviews. In this week’s column, I’m going to discuss some points of interest in the book, some of which haven’t gotten as much attention as they deserve.The authors are strong supporters of methodological individualism, and they cite Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action in defense of this view. Actions must always be traced back to individual decisions, and they reject “organic” conceptions of the state that

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.

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Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy the State, which was published nearly ninety years ago in 1935, had a great influence on Murray Rothbard, transmitted though his friend and mentor Frank Chodorov, who was Nock’s main follower. The book is rich in insights, some of which I have discussed in a forthcoming review for The Misesian, but there are many more. In what follows, I’ll comment on some of these.Nock distinguishes two ways in which people in a community can co-exist. One is by peaceful cooperation and the other is by taking what others have produced. He calls the first way the “economic means” and the second the “political means.” By Nock’s definition, the state is necessarily parasitic: “The State, then, whether primitive, feudal or merchant, is the organization of

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.

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Classical liberals like Friedrich Hayek and Richard Epstein have often claimed that the rule of law imposes strong constraints on the state’s regulation of private property. If they are right, this would be a highly effective argument against such regulation, as the rule of law is an ideal commanding wide respect, by no means confined to those of classical-liberal or libertarian inclinations.Governments that arbitrarily deny legal process to groups of people or punish people for violating orders undisclosed to them obviously violate the rule of law; but how can formal requirements of proper law such as generality and nondiscrimination limit the power of the state to regulate property? The classical liberals answer that people should be able to use law to guide

The First Amendment: Essays on the Imperative of Intellectual Freedomby Tara Smith, Onkar Ghate, Gregory Salmieri, and Elan JournoAyn Rand Institute Press, 2024418 pp.What is the source of human rights? Are they derived from man’s nature, or are they simply privileges that the government grants to its citizens? Or is some intermediate view also an option? According to Murray Rothbard and Ayn Rand, the first of these positions is correct.Tara Smith—the principal author of the essays collected in The First Amendment and a philosopher who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin—is a leading member of the Ayn Rand Institute, and her collaborators are associated with it as well. You would anticipate that they would support the former view (i.e., that human beings

The Fake China Threat and Its Very Real Dangerby Joseph Solis-MullenLibertarian Institute, 2023; vii + 145 pp.It’s often claimed that China, aspiring to world hegemony, plans to wage war against the United States. Democrats and Republicans alike warn of an impending war. Joseph Solis-Mullen, a libertarian who often writes for antiwar.com and knows a great deal about China (although he claims he is no Sinologist), dissents. In his view, China poses no threat to America. The difficulty in the relations between the two countries rather stems from the fact that China has built up sufficient military capacity to have a good chance of defeating an American assault aimed at defending Taiwan, which is hardly evidence of Chinese aggression. Solis-Mullen maintains that the

How States Think: The Rationality of Foreign Policyby John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian RosatoYale University Press, 2023; 304 pp.In this very useful book, the political scientists John J. Mearsheimer and Sebastian Rosato warn against a logic that leads to war: America is challenged by an evil dictator who will not respond rationally to incentives. Such a person can be dealt with only through overwhelming force and must be eliminated from the scene. Today Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un are the world’s irrational dictators, and in past years it was Saddam Hussein.The fallacy in this way of thinking, Mearsheimer and Rosato aver, is that these dictators, however evil we may consider them, and the states they represent are in fact acting in a rational way. This at

Herbert Butterfield was Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University. He was a renowned historian, who contributed important books on diplomatic history, the history of historical writing, the politics of George III, and the history of science. He and Leonard Liggio—a close associate of Murray Rothbard for many decades—were friends.I would like to concentrate on an aspect of Butterfield’s thought, likely to be of considerable interest to libertarians, especially libertarians who follow Rothbard. Butterfield, though not himself a libertarian, viewed with alarm the power of the state. He would have agreed with Jacob Burckhardt that “power is evil.” Power, he thought, often disguises itself in self-righteousness: a powerful state will endeavor to portray

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.

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Praxeological Ethics: An Inquiry into the Nature and Foundation of Ethicsby J.W. Rich; (Independently published, 2024, 153)I met J.W. Rich when he was a student last month at Mises University, and he mentioned to me that he was working on a book about praxeological ethics. He has now sent me the book, and it is very impressive indeed. It is remarkable in its scope, and in what follows I’ll indicate some points of the many insightful points in the book as well as a few places where the argument moves too quickly.“Praxeological ethics” appears to be a contradiction in terms, in that praxeology—Ludwig von Mises’s science of human action—was conceived by him to be a value-free science, but one can hardly speak of a value-free ethics. (Rich does not distinguish between

A tautology is a law of logic, part of a law of logic, or a definition. Some people do not think that tautologies tell us anything useful, pointing out that if someone inquires about the weather, to be told, “Either it’s raining or it’s not raining,” is not very helpful.Ludwig von Mises disagrees with this view. He would readily acknowledge that there are useless tautologies, but he suggests in Human Action that there are also useful tautologies. (Whether he changed his mind on the status of the propositions of praxeology in works written after Human Action isn’t a topic that will be addressed in this article).Mises says:“Aprioristic reasoning is purely conceptual and deductive. It cannot produce anything else but tautologies and analytic judgments. All its

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.

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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.

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The American Constitution is far from perfect, but one good feature is that it lacks a provision found in some European constitutions. This provision allows the president to suspend the Constitution if there is a national emergency.As the theologian David Bentley Hart observes,“I am not a devout admirer of the United States constitution, but I do find many of its essential principles admirable — chief among them, the refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of a ‘state of exception.’ Ideally, a president merely presides: he or she supervises the executive function of a parliamentary legal order, but is in no sense elevated above that order. In actual practice, of course, this too has as often as not proved something of a fiction — even Lincoln suspended habeas

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.

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“The Hamilton Scheme: An Epic Tale of Money and Power in the American Founding”by William HogelandNew York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024; x + 575 pp.Most readers of the Mises Wire will be familiar with the account of American history developed in many books by Mises Institute President Thomas J. DiLorenzo. According to him, American history since our founding as a nation has been shaped by two conflicting traditions: one, begun by Alexander Hamilton, favoring a centralized government and the other, best personified in Thomas Jefferson, supporting decentralized government and the rights of the states and local communities. Hamilton favored building up American industry artificially through high tariffs, as well as a national bank and a system of costly “national

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.

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Woodrow Wilson is no longer the left-wing icon he once was owing to his role in promoting segregation in federal employment, and this revised view is much evidenced in Corey Brettschneider’s work “The Presidents and the People.” Those of us already inclined to a negative view of Wilson will find much of value in the book.According to Brettschneider, beginning with his time as a graduate student in political science at Johns Hopkins University, Wilson believed throughout his academic career in a strong state based on hierarchy.“Wilson attended lectures about how history could be theorized in systematic terms that describe a progressive improvement of the human condition. He became absorbed by the philosophy of Georg Hegel. … In Hegel’s works, personal freedom was

The economist and social critic Glenn C. Loury has written a book sure to attract attention, but in what follows, I don’t propose to address what is likely to be the principal source of that attention. In Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative (W.W. Norton, 2024), Loury has offered an account of his life that reads like a romantic thriller. Readers in search of salacious gossip will find it in abundance. It transpires, for example, that both Loury and the Nobel-Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling led “double lives.” At the risk of losing my readers’ interest, I’ll discuss a problem in the way Loury argues that is distressingly common nowadays.Loury, I claim, is guilty of argument by fiat. In setting up a problem, he treats certain premises 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.

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