Tag Archives: 6b) Mises.org

[This article is excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (1995), volume 2, chapter 9: “Roots of Marxism: Messianic Communism,” section 3, “The Conspiracy of the Equals.” Inspired by the works of Mably and especially Morelly, a young journalist from Picardy decided, amidst the turmoil of the French Revolution, to found a conspiratorial revolutionary organization to establish communism. Strategically, this was an advance on the two...

In attempting to counter Marxists, some libertarians inadvertently align themselves with statist institutions and support immoral war efforts. This concession to evil contradicts the foundational principles laid out by authors like Murray Rothbard and should be challenged.A couple of months ago, I heard such a naïve perspective from an Argentinian libertarian in an X Spaces, reflective of a broader trend within the libertarian liberty movement. Recent foreign...

Mainstream financial news today is replete with stories about “distress” in the commercial real estate market. But what is the precise nature of this distress, and what implications does it have for those outside of the respective industry or asset class? More importantly, what set of factors contributed to the distress, and what does that say about its potential alleviation?Broadly, “distress” in the commercial real estate context refers to the inability of a...

Earlier this week, those of us who follow news about the US dollar’s global status noticed numerous claims that the US-Saudi petrodollar agreement had “expired” and that the Saudis would now sell oil for many currencies other than dollars. Some versions of the story even claimed the Chinese yuan would replace the dollar. The reports appear to have originated either in India or in publications that cater to crypto investors. Fervor over the story was large enough that...

Those who have (wisely) not been following the “decolonization” debate may be surprised to learn that decolonizers characterize reason and rationality as cultural constructs that ought to be rejected, as these are said to be “based upon epistemological assumptions deeply rooted in the Western philosophical tradition” and therefore “perpetuate hegemonic thinking.” The decolonizers argue that reason and rationality ought to yield to “other ways of knowing” that are...

Several months ago, I was on a long car trip with my dad, and we listened to a podcast that gave some commentary on the following headlines from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal: “AI Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn” and “AI Poses ‘Risk of Extinction’ on Par with Pandemics and Nuclear War, Tech Executives Warn.”Obviously, this was in the wake of new AI technologies like ChatGPT and others. This is also not a new issue. In 2017, the Wall...

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....

2024 marks the fourth class of the Ron Paul Scholars Seminar. If you are a student interested in peace and prosperity, a non-interventionist foreign policy, the Liberty movement, and in making contacts in your peer group who are not stuck in the mental prison of our political duopoly, please consider applying to be a 2024 Ron Paul Scholar. This year’s event will take place on Friday, August 30.The Ron Paul Scholars Seminar is a one-day, interactive foreign policy and...

President George Washington famously warned against entangling alliances in his farewell address to Congress. However, now more than ever, it seems that escalations across the globe are tempting the United States to become increasingly involved in other countries’ dilemmas. American citizens and legislators must remember part of what made the American experiment so unique and resist those temptations. Here’s why.The US defense budget is unjustifiable. In 2021,...

Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction (2006) has remained since its publication one of the most influential studies of the Nazi economy. Tooze, an economic historian who teaches at Columbia University, writes from a leftist perspective and does not appear to be familiar with the work of Ludwig von Mises, but the interpretation he offers of the aims of Nazi economic policy is the same as that of Mises. In what follows, I will first discuss Mises’s analysis and then...