A definition of “projection” is when one baselessly accuses others of doing something unsavory, immoral, or illegal that he is actually doing. For example, a thief who, without proof, accuses others of being thieves. This is what socialists do when they call their intellectual and political opponents “fascists” or compare them to Hitler. Fascism is socialism, as Lew Rockwell recently reminded us in an essay entitled “National Socialism Was Socialist.” Socialists calling opponents of socialism fascists and Hitler-like is a classic example of projection. Socialists started out claiming that their goal was forced egalitarianism with the means being government ownership of the means of production. Then, according to Ludwig von Mises, it also came to be defined as

Labor unions are exempted from federal antitrust laws including the Sherman Antitrust Act, which outlaws “conspiracies in restraint of trade.” This is not a bad thing: Everyone should be exempted from antitrust laws. They are an assault on property rights and because their rulings are so arbitrary they are incompatible with justice and fairness. They are also a tool of rent-seeking businesses who practice “lawfare” by routinely suing their superior competitors for dropping their prices, improving their products, and serving their customers better than they do. When they can’t (or won’t) compete in the marketplace they resort to antitrust lawsuits to harass their competitors instead of better serving their customers. They have been a drag on the American economy

Libertarians understand — or should understand — that military conscription is a form of slavery or involuntary servitude. In fact, everyone should understand this. And yet conscription has been employed by the U.S. government for the past 161 years, ever since Abraham Lincoln signed the first federal conscription act into law in March 1863, enslaving thousands of American men.For those who are killed in battle or executed for desertion, conscription is worse than slavery because it robs them of their very lives. To this day, one of the penalties for desertion in wartime is death. At various times in history the U.S. government has shot deserters in firing squads, and it has even imprisoned or shot civilian conscription protesters.Even if one volunteers for the

Wow, what a week Mises University 2024 was! I have been a Mises University faculty member for over 30 years, and this—the 38th year of Mises U—may have been the best! Students came from 12 countries, 29 states, and 69 colleges and universities, including Yale and Princeton. The faculty, always outstanding, was truly inspiring and the students responded with great enthusiasm and endless questions.A true highlight of the week was the presentation by Dr. Robert Malone, our special guest speaker. Dr. Malone discussed his forthcoming book, “PsyWar: Enforcing the New World Order” (written with his wife, Jill). It was an engaging and important talk, and the students were utterly captivated by it. You can also listen to this engaging talk here. As of this writing, it has

I am excited to announce our next major project here at the Mises Institute, the Lessons for the Young Economist video series. This will be designed for homeschoolers and young people. It will be something they will actually want to watch! And with the Mises Institute’s name on it, parents, grandparents, and educators will know they can trust the content.The latest estimates reveal that nearly 2.7 million students have exited government public schools. These students’ families have rejected the state’s indoctrination and now they need solid instructional materials, especially in economics.We have all heard the horrible and evil lies that kids have been taught in public schools. This series is the antidote.Early in my university teaching career (which started 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.

[embedded content]

In discussing the Mises Institute’s June 24th full-page Wall Street Journal ad entitled “Who Needs the Fed?” on talk radio recently most of the interviewers naturally expressed skepticism over whether the Fed could ever actually be abolished and a gold-and-silver standard reinstituted. It reminded me of something Murray Rothbard said about this. If the government had monopolized say, shoe production a hundred years ago and someone suggested the privatization of shoe production, there would be cries of: “Who will make shoes? The government has always made shoes!” Well, America has not always had a central bank and in fact, the three precursors of the Fed — the Bank of North America, the First Bank of the United States, and the Second Bank of the United States —

A June 27 FOX News online headline announced that sixteen left-wing Nobel prize-winning economists had signed a petition declaring that if Donald Trump is elected there will be increased inflation, while praising “Bidenomics” to the treetops. Apart from the fact that there is no such thing as “Bidenomics” – which is nothing more than the usual wild vote buying from every special interest group imaginable funded by Fed monetization of more debt (and more inflation) – the petition is further evidence of the pathetic, politicized state of “mainstream” academic economics. Highlighted in the FOX News article is Mr. Janet Yellen, aka George Akerlof, the husband of the Treasury Secretary (who reportedly received $7 million in “speaking fees” shortly before assuming that

“First of all, don’t target civilians.”~Murray Rothbard’s first principle of just war in his essay, “Just War”Like Hans Hoppe I have been a friend of Walter Block’s for decades. I co-authored a book and an article with him, sponsored a guest lecture by him at my university; lectured twice at his invitation at Loyola University New Orleans; wrote dozens of online articles in his defense when he was libeled by the administrators of Loyola University Maryland for giving a world-class (but non-woke) lecture on the economics of discrimination; and wrote in his defense against the New York Times smear of him.Walter has published hundreds of articles but he is probably best known to the general public for his book, Defending the Undefendable, and many related writings

For more than thirty years, lecturing at Mises University has been the highlight of my academic year. Students arrive filled with excitement about this experience—a weeklong intellectual feast that for many of them will be life changing. What a delight for an economics professor like me to have the opportunity to teach free market, Austrian economics to intelligent, motivated, and wonderful young people with a genuine passion for learning. Opening night at Mises University is always overflowing with excitement and anticipation. I marvel at how the students often cheer when the faculty is introduced, as if we were rock stars! The students and faculty feed off each other’s enthusiasm, which is one reason the week is so special.Over four thousand young people from

The thirty-eighth annual Mises University, where I have lectured for more than thirty of those years, will be held from July 28th to August 3rd at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama. Year after year, student attendees from all over the world tell us that it was the best week of their school year; that they learned more about the economic world in that week than in four years of college; that they would love to come back next summer; and that they will urge their friends and classmates to apply next year. Mises University is the world’s leading instructional program inAustrian economics. Staffed by some of the world’s leading Austrian School economists, all of whom are excellent speakers and teachers, students attend lectures and discussions all day long for a

Few Americans seem aware of the fact that it was the New England Federalists who plotted to secede from the union a half century before the 1860-61 secession of the Southern states. Their efforts culminated in the Hartford secession convention of 1814 where they decided in the end to remain in the union after all, confident that they would eventually dominate national politics to their economic advantage. The leader of the New England secessionists was Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering who had been George Washington’s adjutant general and quartermaster general during the Revolution and served as secretary of state and secretary of war in the Washington administration, as a member of congress from Massachusetts, and as secretary of state in the John Adams

After the War to Prevent Southern Independence and the assassination of Lincoln the federal government was said to possess a "treasury of virtue." The Republican Party, which was the federal government, with a decades-long monopoly of power rivaled only by the Bolsheviks in Russia, made sure that the government-run schools would preach this Virtuous State Philosophy to generations of school children.And what did the Party of Virtue do with its "treasure"? A first order of business was to commence a campaign of ethnic genocide against the Plains Indians. Initiated just three months after the end of the war, and with Generals Grant, Sherman and Sheridan in charge, all of the Plains Indians — women and children included — would be either murdered or imprisoned on

This month, we will host the Austrian Economics Research Conference (AERC), one of our most important programs. We’ll have thirty-one students attending, and nineteen students will deliver papers of their own. How encouraging!Dr. Joseph Salerno, our Academic Vice President, says: “The students who present papers at AERC are of the highest quality. They are attracted by a scholarly competition offering generous monetary awards in which paper submissions are subjected to a rigorous evaluation by a committee of senior Austrian scholars. A paper presentation at AERC to an audience of professional economists is an all-important first step for the student who aims to pursue an academic career.”We all know universities are full of leftists, but Dr.

Investor and author Doug Casey recently wrote that most economists “are political apologists masquerading as economists.” He says they are like witch doctors pretending to be neurosurgeons. They “prescribe the way they would like the world to work and tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for more power.” The discipline of economics, says Casey, “has been turned into the handmaiden of government in order to give scientific justification for things the government wants to do.”“Intellectuals” have always been a key ingredient in the glue that holds government tyranny together, supplying endless rationales and excuses for less freedom and more government, Murray Rothbard wrote in Anatomy of the State. Among the most

Recorded in Tampa, Florida, on February 17, 2024.
Special thanks to Liberty Villages and the Shrader family for sponsoring this event.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

In a 1922 essay about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in his book Prejudices: Third Series H.L. Mencken asked, “Am I the first American to note the fundamental nonsensicality of the Gettysburg Address”? One example of the nonsense of Lincoln’s rhetoric as explained by Mencken is as follows:
“Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their

Please help us in our fight to save freedom in America—and indeed the rest of the world—by making as generous a donation as you can.
I became a student of Austrian economics and libertarian philosophy by accident. In my first semester in college in 1972, I signed up for Principles of Microeconomics. In the classroom was a bookshelf that happened to have all the back issues of The Freeman published by the Foundation for Economic Education. I started reading some of the articles—by Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt, Gary North, Israel Kirzner, William Hutt, and other free-market writers—and I was hooked! I decided then that I wanted to be like these brave, highly educated, and articulate men who were so devoted to the cause of a free

Dear Friend,
In the chapter of The Road to Serfdom entitled “The End of Truth,” F.A. Hayek wrote that in a totalitarian society “truth” is not determined by scholarship, research, discussion, and debate but by pronouncements by the government “authorities.” Anthony Fauci’s notorious “I am science” declaration is a perfect example of such totalitarian thinking, as is Al Gore’s “settled science” declaration regarding global-warming research. Of course, no real scientist would say that scientific questions are ever “settled” forevermore. It was once “settled science” that Earth is flat, after all, and that government can make us all rich thanks to the “multiplier effect” of government spending.
But that’s just one arm of the totalitarian scissors. The other arm is

The impending decline of the dollar is apparently imposing a real Halloween scare on the American foreign policy establishment. An August 22, 2023, article on the Council on Foreign Relations website entitled “The Future of Dollar Hegemony” explained that 
the dollar’s global hegemony gives the U.S. government power to impose crippling sanctions and wage other forms of financial welfare against adversaries. . . . In 2022, more than twelve thousand entities were under sanction by the Treasury Department, a more than twelve-fold increase since the turn of the century. U.S. sanctions . . . do ensure that targeted adversaries pay a significant price for continuing to engage in actions the United States opposes (emphasis added).
This reminds yours truly of a very

[This article is adapted from a lecture delivered at the Reno Mises Circle in Reno, Nevada. on May 20, 2023.]
It is not an exaggeration to say that property rights are a prerequisite for civilization. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth:
Private property creates for the individual a sphere in which he is free of the state. It sets limits to the operation of the authoritarian will. It allows other forces to arise side by side with and in opposition to political power. It thus becomes the basis of all those activities that are free from violent interference on the part of the state. It is the soil in which the seeds of freedom are nurtured and in which the autonomy of the individual and ultimately all intellectual and material progress

Every day, more and more Americans are awakening to the reality that the institutions in control of this nation are failing them. From violence in the streets, inflation in our stores, increasing tyranny and censorship, and absolute buffoonery on public display in halls of political power. The ruling class is getting richer while most of us suffer, and new generations are becoming increasingly warped by the dangerous ideologies of the left.
Recorded at The Depot Craft Brewery & Distillery in Reno, Nevada on May 20th, 2023.

[embedded content]

Tags: Featured,newsletter

Like virtually all of the work of Ludwig von Mises, these two essays, his 1958 Liberty and Property and his 1950 Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism are timeless. They are as important now as they have ever been and will increase in relevance as the growth of government continues almost unabated.
The growth of government constitutes an assault on private property and individual freedom by politicians, bureaucrats, and interest groups who seek to keep for themselves more and more of the fruits of other peoples’ labor and to use the coercive powers of the state to tell others how to live their lives. The perpetual campaigns at all levels of government for more taxes and regulation threaten to rob us of our personal freedoms while exacerbating social and