The recent murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Health Care, has led many people to claim that private health insurance is an example of what is wrong with the free market, and that we ought in consequence of its manifest failures to institute a government run single-payer system. Some ghoulish leftists went so far as to post messages on Twitter expressing joy that Thompson had been killed. The Daily Mail reports: “The assassination of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson has triggered tasteless celebrations and bad taste support for the gunman who killed him.Mr. Thompson was shot outside the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan on Wednesday morning by a masked assassin, who remains on the run and whose motive has not been disclosed.As news of the cold-blooded

The unusually extensive “pardon” by lame-duck “President” Biden has been much in the news lately, but the pardon is not the main issue we should be interested in. The real issue is that the Bidens, both father and son, are evil. Hunter’s Biden’s “lost” laptop—which 501 “security professionals” falsely claimed was a Russian fake —reveals warmongering brazen in its duplicity.Concerning the pardon, only this need be said. Of course no one should be prosecuted for tax “evasion.” You are entitled to all your income, as the great Murray Rothbard has taught us. But there is nothing special about being the president’s son. Everybody convicted of tax evasion should be pardoned and nobody should be prosecuted for it. Even better, we should abolish the IRS. the CIA, and the

Naomi Wolf is a truly heroic figure, and the publication of her great book The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity makes her heroic stature even more evident than it was before. I’m not going to write a detailed review of the book, because it consists of thousands of documents that a lawsuit she initiated compelled Pfizer to release. I’ll just mention a few of the highlights. Pfizer knew a couple of months after its vaccine was ruled “safe and effective” by the FDA that the vaccine “risked heart damage in young men.” By the way, the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization ruling bypassed the usual FDA procedures, which require ten to twelve years of testing until a new vaccine is approved. Pfizer and other companies in Big Pharma had their bases covered, in

Lame duck “President” Joe Biden and his gang of neocon controllers, overcome by hatred of Donald Trump and the near certainty that, if they do not act now, the Ukraine War will soon be settled, have set in motion a process that could destroy the world in a nuclear Armageddon.As everybody knows, Donald Trump wants to terminate the Ukraine war, and he wants to accomplish this by negotiating a settlement in which Ukraine would give up some disputed territory also claimed by Russia in return for a withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. Both sides would gain from this settlement, and a long and costly war would end.But brain-dead Biden hates Trump and still wants the pro-Nazi Zelensky regime to conquer Russia, thus preserving American world hegemony. Of course,

Like many of you, I was happy that Donald Trump won the election. Kamala Harris is a committed Marxist, supporter of baby killing, and passionate advocate of the woke ideology. In foreign policy, she would have been guided by the neocons who control brain dead “President” Joe Biden.But we shouldn’t be complacent. Trump is far from ideal, and we need to do all we can to work against the policies he favors that are inimical to a free society. Beyond that, we need to work for a fully libertarian society, as advocated by Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul.Let’s first look at Trump’s bad areas, and a good place to start is foreign policy. One bright spot is that he wants to settle the Ukraine war, instead of supplying the pro-Nazi Zelensky regime with billions of dollars and

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 election is upon us. We wonder whether we have to have war, tariffs, and deficit spending, regardless of whom we support. What are we to do? Faced with the intractable problems of misgovernment, we need to look deeper. Following the great Murray Rothbard, we should ask, do we need a State at all? Rothbard’s answer was a clear “No.” And not only do we not need a State; the State is a menace.Following Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock, Rothbard identified the State as a predatory organism. It is the “organization of the political means.” The State produces nothing by itself but takes what other people have produced. Froom this we can deduce a vital fact. Society must have existed before the State. Otherwise, there would be nothing for the State to take.But

In recent years, a disturbing development has taken place in America’s universities. People who apply for faculty positions, and those who are on the faculty and want to be promoted are required to make “diversity statements,” in which they declare their commitment to DEI—diversity, equality, inclusion—and detail their activities on behalf of this goal.Here is an example of this: at UCLA, applicants to the faculty have to sign this: “Diversity statements usually are no more than two pages and speak to your experience, capabilities, and commitment to working with people from different backgrounds and to advancing a more inclusive, diverse and/or equitable academic environment. You can demonstrate these values through your teaching, research, and service. Keep in

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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[Editor’s note: This article originally ran on LewRockwell.com on July 28, 2000. Even before the Bush-Gore election wrapped up, Rockwell put his finger on what the Republicans had in store for America. For those who paid attention to Rockwell in this period, they were not shocked when the Bush administration came out in favor of the TSA, the Patriot Act, the NSA, the destruction of the Fourth Amendment, and more. 9/11 was an excuse to impose a police state on America, but it was something Bush and his allies had always wanted. If Trump wins next month, let’s hope he has learned his lesson about the Cheneys, the Pences, and all the rest of the Buckleyite, Bushian GOP. ~R. McMaken] All things equal, it looks like a shoe-in for George W. Bush.So I’m wondering: is it

Some people argue like this: Although the Fed as it now exists is very bad, a nation needs a central bank to regulate its money supply, and the Fed is better than nothing. That being so, we should try to urge the Fed to adopt a non-expansionary monetary policy. In this view, calls to “End the Fed” are mistaken. I’m sure most of my readers already know what I’m about to say, but, just to be clear, that view is disastrously wrong. We do not need a central bank, and to argue in the way indicated is to betray the great Murray Rothbard and the great Dr. Ron Paul, whose slogan “End the Fed” has galvanized so many of us.What we need is the classical gold standard, based on 100% reserve banking. There is no need for an expansion of the monetary system, even a gradual

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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Many people oppose the free market because it leads to inequality of wealth and income. It is unfair, they say, that some people have vastly more money than others. Some defenders of the free market respond that these inequalities, while undesirable in themselves, make the poor better off than they would be otherwise, and so should be accepted. Another argument made by defenders of the free market is that restricting inequality would interfere liberty, so that, although inequality is bad, we have to put up with it.While it is true that inequality makes the poor better off and that restricting inequality interferes with liberty, these are not the best arguments that defenders of the free market should use. They accept that inequality is bad, but we should reject

Most readers of my weekly column already favor a libertarian society, with either a strictly limited government or no government at all. They realize what a disaster the state has been. What are the philosophical foundations of this outlook? There are many possible answers, but in this column, I’m going to discuss three of the most important of these, the way Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe address this issue. I’m not going to take a stand on which is best but just set forward the different views and leave the choice to you.I’ll begin with Mises, as most readers will find this the easiest to understand. Suppose you want to do something, e.g., go for a drive in the country. Why do you want to do it? There are any number of possible answers

The Old Right was a principled band of intellectuals and activists, many of them libertarians, who fought the “industrial regimentation” of the New Deal, and were the first to note that, in America, statism and corporatism are inseparable. Despite some current claims, however, these writers ardently defended capitalism, including big business and corporations, celebrated the profit motive, and took a strict laissez-faire attitude towards international trade. They loathed tariffs, and saw protectionism as a species of socialist planning.Frank Chodorov was a central intellectual figure on the Right from the 1920s to the 1950s, editing the early Freeman magazine and founding Human Events and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. A prolific writer, Chodorov guided

These days, supporters of President Trump and others on the right are often smeared as “fascists,” and what is meant by this is that they support the Nazis. For example, the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat says: “To get people to lose their aversion to violence, savvy authoritarians also dehumanize their enemies. That’s what Trump is doing. Hitler used this ploy from the very start, calling Jews the ‘black parasites of the nation’ in a 1920 speech. By the time Hitler got into power in 1933 and translated dehumanizing rhetoric into repressive policies, Germans had heard these messages for over a decade.As a historian of autocracy with a specialization in Italian Fascism, the use of the ‘vermin’ image got my attention. Mussolini used similar language in his 1927 Ascension

In 1981, when I was thinking about starting the Mises Institute, the two things that really motivated me were, one, that I thought that the Austrian school was diminishing in influence in this country and other countries. The other thing: I thought that Mises, who I thought was such a great hero, was no longer being recognized. I thought that was an alarming and quite a terrible thing.So, I asked Mrs. Mises to her favorite restaurant, which was the Russian Tea Room, and asked her if I succeeded in founding this institute, would she be our chairman? She said, “I know you‘re just interested in my name, you‘re not interested in anything else.” And I said, “No, no, I am interested in what you would have to say.”Murray Rothbard had told me that she was a one-woman

Socialists and other leftwingers support taxation of the income and wealth of the well off. They say that they want to promote “equality” and “social justice,” but in fact they are motivated by envy. They want what others have. They can’t stand the thought of other people’s having more money than they do.Here is what Rob Larson, an economics professor at Tacoma Community College, says about certain very expensive apartments: “Besides the return of in-city mansions for the affluent and their cars, New York and London have also seen the growth of ‘poor doors.’ These are entrances to new luxury buildings, erected with a city requirement to include some affordable housing units for regular working people, in addition to ‘market rate’ units that sell

Democracy is not the best political system, and its defects have been amply exposed in Hans-Hermann-Hoppe’s great book, Democracy: The God That Failed. But we do live in a democracy, for better or worse, and in this system, the winner of an election is entitled to take power. The Left doesn’t accept this. If they oppose a candidate, they will subject him to venomous hatred and suggest that it would be a good thing if he was killed. We saw this is the barrage of anti-Trump attacks shortly before his attempted assassination, such as brain-dead “President” Joe Biden’s call to put Trump in a bull’s eye. I’ll cover some of these threats to Trump later, but first, I’d like to give some historical examples of how the Left operates in “democracies.”In the 1930’s, the

The attempt to assassinate Donald Trump and his heroic response to it are uppermost in our minds. We don’t yet know the details of who was involved in the attempt on his life, though I suspect that the “lone gunman” theory will turn out to be false. But the sad event offers us a chance to reflect on something that we do know, and that may well be relevant to the attempt on the former—and we trust soon to be next—president’s life: The CIA has been involved in numerous assassination plots since its inception.One of these plots is especially important in current circumstances. The CIA is implicated in the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963. Jacob Hornberger has done a great deal of research on this topic and here is what he says. “Why would the CIA

[This talk was delivered at the Future of Freedom Foundation‘s conference on “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties,” on June 6, 2008, in Reston, Virginia.]The US central bank, called the Federal Reserve, was created in 1913. No one promoted this institution with the slogan that it would make wars more likely and guarantee that nearly half a million Americans will die in battle in foreign lands, along with millions of foreign soldiers and civilians.No one pointed out that this institution would permit Americans to fund, without taxes, the destruction of cities abroad and overthrow governments at will. No one said that the central bank would make it possible for the United States to be at large-scale war in one of every four years for a full

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 lines of people hope to be hired.Why is this? It has something to do with the fact that public schools are part of our civic religion, the primary evidence that people cite to show that local government serves us. And there is a psychological element. Most of us turn our kids over to them, so surely they must have our best interest at heart!But do they? Murray N. Rothbard’s Education: Free and Compulsory explains that the

Editors Note: This week, we are celebrating Lew Rockwell’s 80th Birthday and the debut of our trailer for Playing With Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve. Click here to learn more.I’m sure that you have had this experience before, or something similar to it. You are sitting at lunch in a nice restaurant or perhaps a hotel. Waiters are coming and going. The food is fantastic. The conversation about all things is going well. You talk about the weather, music, movies, health, trivialities in the news, kids, and so on. But then the topic turns to economics, and things change.You are not the aggressive type so you don’t proclaim the merits of the free market immediately. You wait and let the others talk. Their biases against business appear right away in the

Some libertarians argue that libertarianism requires support for “open borders,” but this is a mistake. “Open borders” is the view in the existing world of states, the state ought to admit as many people who want to come to the United States as possible. Of course, you don’t have the right to occupy property that is privately owned. But much of the property in the United States is “public,” which means that it is up to those who run the state to decide what to do with it. Of course, this is an unsatisfactory situation and we should do what we can to bring about a world with no “public” property and no state, but for now the question is what to do: open borders or not?The answer is quite clear. “Open borders” would be a. disastrous mistake. The policy would subject

Editors Note: This week, we are celebrating Lew Rockwell’s 80th Birthday and the debut of our trailer for Playing With Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve. Click here to learn more.It seems incredible that in the last days, a fundamental right of the whole of humanity, the freedom of association, has been denounced by the New York Times and all major opinion sources, even as a national political figure was reluctant to defend his own statements in favor of the idea, and then distanced himself from the notion. Has such a fundamental principle of liberty become unsayable?Or perhaps it is not so incredible. An overweening government, in an age of despotism such as ours, must deny such a fundamental right simply because it is one of those core issues that

Editors Note: This week, we are celebrating Lew Rockwell’s 80th Birthday and the debut of our trailer for Playing With Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve. Click here to learn more.This was the keynote address at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s new building dedication and conference on the great Austrian economists, June 5-6, 1998, in Auburn, Alabama. * * * *We come together at a crucial time in the history of the Mises Institute and the history of liberty. This weekend, we dedicate a new home, which we see as a new headquarters of the Austrian School of economics and the scholarship of liberty. We are deeply grateful to all who have made it possible. You show your commitment to the ideas that underlie the free and prosperous commonwealth of Mises’s

Last week, a conversation with a waitress disturbed me a lot. She told me that she was homeschooling her sixteen-year old son, who is autistic, because she was afraid that he would be subjected to “tranny” propaganda and encouraged to “transition” to being a woman. Even worse, he might be put in touch with “doctors” who would mutilate him by injecting him with hormones and even castrating him, all without his parents’ knowledge. You might think the waitress was exaggerating—we all know that public schools are bad, but can they be that bad? If she is right, the schools would be monstrously evil. They would be downright satanic.She is indeed right. In what follows, I’ll discuss the “tranny” movement and what they are doing to our children. It’s a tale that will

In recent days, we have had brought home to us what “show trials” are like. They are not confined to Soviet Russia and it satellite countries during the Cold War but are a very present reality to us in America today. Political opponents of Donald Trump charged him with felonies for acts that were entirely legal. The judge in the case was a political opponent of Trump and worked artfully to prevent the trial jury from hearing testimony that would have exposed the imposture.In view of what has happened, I think it would be interesting to discuss some earlier show trials, the Nuremberg trials held after World War II, as discussed in the important book by Danilo Zolo, Victor’s Justice, (Verso, 2009)Should war crimes, i.e., violations of rights during a war, be treated

Rick Rozoff recently sent me a message that helps us understand a basic feature of socialized medicine. It is closely associated with death. Socialists complain that the free market makes medical care “too expensive” for the poor and middle class. Because of this, they propose to provide “free” medical care for everybody. Of course, it isn’t free. It’s either paid for by taxes or inflation, which is itself a cruel tax.But once the “free” care is offered, there is a problem. At a zero, or very low, price, there will be much more medical services that people demand than can be provided. Suppose, for example, that you are having back pains. Should you get an MRI taken of your back? If you had to pay for the test yourself, you would hesitate. But if it

Anti-war students have been staging protests and demonstrations on a great many university campuses throughout America. A number of so-called “conservatives” have called for the police to arrest the students. Zionists groups accuse the students of “anti-Semitism” and demand that they be expelled from school. In fact, libertarians should welcome these protests. They bring back memories of the Vietnam War student protests that participated in, brought down the war-criminal LBJ.The student protests today are actually quite moderate. They call for an end to genocide in Gaza and recognition of the rights of Palestinians who have been killed and had their land taken away from them. Let’s look at an example, the demonstrations at Columbia University, which are ongoing as