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....
Read More »Fiat Money is the Greatest Danger Our Economy Faces
In nature everything has a cycle. Birth, growth, maturation, death. Everything, including the planets and stars. Nothing stays the same. So why does our government believe they can master economic cycles and not experience ups and downs the way nature does? Throughout history, economies haven’t worked that way.For years, to enhance trade, countries tied their currencies to commodities that were scarce, valuable and had steady prices. Often, gold, silver, sometimes...
Read More »Thanks to Government Animal Control, Stray Animals Rule My Neighborhood
In my neighborhood, we have an animal control problem.When I go for a walk, I carry dog mace (a nonlethal alternative to my usual revolver) because there are always, always, loose dogs out. I’ve been followed around by barking dogs many times, and they’re not always on the same streets, which means it’s hard to avoid them. One of my neighbors’ guests was bitten by a loose collie. I narrowly avoided having to break up a dog fight when an aggressive Boston terrier...
Read More »What the Campus Protesters and Their Critics Get Right and Wrong
As the academic year draws to a close, protests have broken out on college campuses across the country. Students are protesting Israel’s actions in Gaza. Generally, they are calling for the United States government to stop arming and funding the war and, in the meantime, for their universities to divest from Israeli businesses.The current spate of protests can be drawn back to April 17, when the president of Columbia University was brought before Congress to testify...
Read More »Why the GOP Betrayed Its Own Voters on Ukraine
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....
Read More »Tin Soldiers and Nixon Coming…
A version of this article first appeared as an exclusive update to RPI subscribers. Subscribe for free here.Student action on university campuses against US involvement in Israel’s slaughter of Gaza has exploded across the country. Suddenly there is the distinct feel in the air of the anti-Vietnam war protests once they finally caught on in 1968 and soon thereafter changed the course of US history.Both protest movements were fully demonized by the same forces of the...
Read More »Creating Wealth: The Cantillon or the Smith Way
For those who have any exposure to the subject, Adam Smith is the father of modern economics. Few have heard of Richard Cantillon. Both wrote on the subject of wealth creation, Cantillon in Essay on the Nature of Trade in General and Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Of the two, Cantillon, who preceded Smith, may have had a firmer grasp on the dynamics of wealth creation. Cantillon is considered the father of entrepreneurship, whereas Adam Smith seemed to go out of his...
Read More »Defending Individual Liberty
The ideal of individual liberty is perennially under attack not only from socialists, as one might logically expect, but also from conservatives who regard individualism as a form of selfishness. The ordinary meaning of selfishness is “caring only about what you want or need without any thought for the needs or wishes of other people,” and many conservatives see this as a major contributing factor in social decline. The conservative British journalist Nick Timothy...
Read More »The Great Chocolate Crisis of 2024
You probably haven’t even noticed the Great Chocolate Crisis of 2024, but it is real and some of us are very concerned! The wholesale price of cocoa, which comes from the cocoa bean, is the main ingredient in chocolate and has skyrocketed in price!When the Spanish Conquistadors came across cocoa 500 years ago it was use by the Aztecs of Mexico in a drink combined with hot peppers—Talk about “hot coco!” It was called "the food of the gods." On the Thornton Necessity...
Read More »How EU Law Has Made the Internet Less Free for Everyone Else
If you have been using the internet for longer than a couple of years, you might have noticed that it used to be much “freer.” What freer means in this context is that there was less censorship and less stringent rules regarding copyright violations on social media websites such as YouTube and Facebook (and consequently a wider array of content), search engines used to often show results from smaller websites, there were less “fact-checkers,” and there were (for...
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