From the Editor—November / December 2024

by
Ryan McMaken
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Another national election has come and gone, and like many of our readers, I think the less awful candidate won. After all, a victory for Kamala Harris was likely to be interpreted as an endorsement of the status quo and a “mandate” for more of the same.

Unfortunately, though, opposition to the status quo is not the same thing as support for peace, freedom, or free markets. Dissatisfaction with the regime is good, but it’s not enough. 

We will see this illustrated many times over in the coming years as the new administration fails to significantly rein in federal spending or to embrace a foreign policy of nonintervention. The foundational institutions of the federal state will likely remain untouched.

It’s not a mystery why this will occur. The unfortunate fact is that politicians’ lack of enthusiasm for dismantling the central state reflects the ideology of much of the American public. Many voters still support endless wars overseas. Many insist that the government not cut funding to their favorite welfare programs. Many even still think that technocrats like FBI  agents and Federal Reserve economists are “public servants.”

So long as a sizable portion of the public continues to support the regime in this way, it’s going to be tough to convince politicians to truly strike at the heart of the state. After all, the one thing most elected officials want more than anything else is to get reelected.

This doesn’t mean we’re not already making progress. It is undeniable that many people do indeed want a radical change in favor of peace and freedom. To this day, we are still seeing the effects of the Ron Paul movement, which ignited much of the present-day opposition to profligate federal spending, to endless foreign wars, and to the despotism of deep state bureaucrats. 

Many who seek real solutions to today’s abuses of power were first exposed to the ideas of radical freedom by Ron Paul many years ago. I think many of those people have, in part, been fueling the growing opposition to the regime we are now witnessing.

But there are still too few of us, and we still have a lot of work to do.

Yes, there is a whiff of dissatisfaction and defiance in the air, but our job now is to do what we can to turn these sentiments against the state itself. This can only be done through the hard work of education and fighting the battle of ideas. We must continue to demonstrate how the state impoverishes us and robs us of our freedoms. We must demonstrate how the state’s wars are engines of despotism at home, and how the state’s socialism can never deliver true prosperity.

In short, we must continue to spread awareness of the true nature of “our enemy, the state.” The phrase comes to us from Albert Jay Nock, the great libertarian of the 1930s. Nock understood the fundamental difference between the peaceful, voluntary society and the violence of the state.

Carrying on this Nockian tradition is central to our work at the Mises Institute, and you’ll see this here in the pages of The Misesian. In this issue, Senior Fellow Alex Pollock shows how the Federal Reserve, like all central banks, exists to make states more wealthy and more powerful. In many ways, Pollock tells us, the central bank’s ability to create money amounts to the state’s ability to print power. You’ll also find commentary from our Academic Vice President Joseph Salerno, who examines how the economics profession has been corrupted into a class of cheerleaders for the state. The systematic erosion of a truly independent economics profession over the past century has paved the way for the state’s endless attacks on private property.

Readers will also find here, as always, new book reviews from David Gordon, plus the latest news on the Institute’s events, students, and scholars. We hope you enjoy it.