SNB & CHF

Jeremy Bentham famously regarded natural rights as “nonsense on stilts” and taught that property rights are created by law and enforced by courts. Bentham’s view was that “before the laws, there was no property: take away the laws, all property ceases.” Lawyers in the Benthamite tradition accordingly set out to define the state-created nature of property rights and the boundaries of these rights as defined by the courts.The elusive nature of property has long...

Starting in 2020, things started to get strange in Africa for those who knew what to look for. Normally, coups in Africa are nothing to write about. But starting in 2020, we saw six countries flip into a pro-Russian direction in just three years. Individually, they were a curiosity. Taken together, that rate of turnover outpaced even the most optimistic neoconservative ambitions for pro–United States regime changes in the Middle East. As General Wesley Clark...

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....

The electoral victory of Javier Milei in Argentina was a pleasant surprise to libertarians internationally. For the first time ever, an open anarchocapitalist was elected president of a sovereign nation. Milei’s fame isn’t limited to libertarian circles, though. Right-wingers all over the world have praised him for his battle against corruption and economic ruin. He was even given a spot headlining for former president Donald Trump at the Conservative Political...

The Spring 2024 issue of the Independent Reviewfeatures a symposium on Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty, which was published some fifty years ago. One of the contributions, by the philosopher Matt Zwolinski, stands out from the others in that it is not favorable to Rothbard. To the contrary, Zwolinski argues that Rothbard’s case for liberty is unsound. In my view, he has failed to show this, but a number of his arguments are interesting, and in what follows, I’ll...

Created in 1960, the United Nations–recognized state of Somalia is by almost all accounts a failed state. Yet it continues to assert dominance over regions that are seeking further autonomy or independence. The UN has listed self-determination as a human right, but the global neighborhood rarely sees this human right respected or enforced by the UN. This is likely because of how slow-moving the UN can be and because the nations that make up the UN have conflicting...

The Misesian (TM): The economics behind gift giving and charity have long been a neglected topic among researchers and economists. What prompted you to launch your own investigation into the topic?Jörg Guido Hülsmann (JGH): The economic literature on gifts is actually quite massive, but it’s true that these writings don’t make it into standard micro- and macroeconomics. My initial interest was sparked by Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical letter Caritas in veritate. The...

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...

Economics trumps sentimentality, and gold’s elevated price has some people raiding the family jewelry box to pay bills. “Young people are not wearing grandma’s jewels. Most of the young people, they want an Apple watch. They don’t want a pocket watch,” Tobina Kahn, president of House of Kahn Estate Jewelers told Bloomberg. “Sentimental is now out the door.”When times are tough, treasures change hands, the late Burt Blumert, once a gold dealer and Mises Institute...

In mundane speech and in perhaps any dictionary, anarchy is synonymous with chaos and disorder. This may not come as a surprise since left-wing anarchists have worked hard on destroying anarchy’s reputation.As a former statist, I used to share this view of anarchy—a chaotic dystopia. But, as I’ve learned over the years, anarchy is the opposite of that. However, this can only be realized by looking at it logically.Defining AnarchyThe word anarchy stems from ancient...