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The BBC recently slapped a “trigger warning” on its popular 1969 series Civilisation, warning that viewers may deem the series objectionable as it presents Eurocentric perspectives. The series is now deemed to be “problematic” because it tells a “European story,” focusing on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. This is criticized by academics—for example, the classicist Mary Beard—for excluding other cultures and also for excluding women while showcasing the...

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 part I here.Milei and the Chances of PrivatizationThough privatizations have not yet arrived, the state-owned airline is on the agenda. The company was renationalized in 2008, forcing taxpayers to prop up an airline that has been directly bailed out by the government since 2021. For true privatization, all regulation prohibiting competition and all taxation in the industry should be abolished—falling short of this, it should come with deregulation and less...

Overpopulation has been a concern for a long time, sparking debates about humanity’s future, resource scarcity, and environmental degradation. The temptation to resort to centralized control measures is significant. However, a closer examination reveals two major problems with such an approach.The ethical problemThe violation of individual rights is the first issue. As Murray Rothbard explains in ‘The Ethics Of Liberty,’ individuals have an inherent right to own...

I heard a rumor the other day that Democrats are throwing the Presidential election. Party apparatchiks believe the stock market will crash, sinking the economy and they would rather have it all implode on Donald Trump’s watch, paving the way for having a Democrat in the White House from 2028 until eternity. This sort of conspiracy theory seemed spectacularly implausible until I read in the New York Times, that anti-Trump Republicans believe the Biden campaign is...

How to Run Wars: A Confidential Playbook for the National Security Eliteby Christopher J. Coyne and Abigail R. HallIndependent Institute, 2024; xvii + 198 pp.This is an excellent book, but I should like to begin, characteristically, with a complaint. Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall, who are both economists favorable to the free market, present an excellent criticism of America’s pursuit of global hegemony, ably showing the immense costs of this policy. They do so...

Overview: The dollar is mostly consolidating yesterday's losses ahead of month-end and the US income and consumption data. The PCE core deflator may have risen by 0.2%, the least this, year, but the year-over-year rate is expected to be steady at 2.8%. The dollar is recovering from a five-day low against the yen recorded yesterday near JPY156.40 and is near JPY157.30 in the late European morning turnover. The yen's retreat and a disappointing Chinese PMI have...

There is no shortage of former hangers-on at the Mises Institute who now claim to have deep insights into the inner workings of the Institute and its staff. Among these people, one will often find a certain group of people who never miss an opportunity to tell you all about how tight they once were with the Institute staff, and how now they can no longer support the Institute because “it changed.” The latest writer that checks the usual boxes of the...

In teasing out right from wrong, discriminate we must between acts that are criminal only because The State has criminalized them (mala prohibita), as opposed to acts which are universally evil (malum in se). Israel’s sacking of Gaza is malum in se, universally evil. Gaza is clearly an easy case in ethics. It’s not as though the genocide underway in Gaza could ever be finessed or gussied up.Yet in Israel, no atrocity perpetrated by the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) in...

It should not have escaped the politically aware that the threats to freedom in Western societies are now unprecedented. This goes far beyond the interventionist pressures that over time have been slowly throttling most Western economies. The Western oligarchic elite are now dead set on implementing what one influential blogger described as “a society hermetically sealed against any form of rebellion, dissidence, or questioning of the ruling class-imposed power...