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In private business “[t]here is no need to limit the discretion of subordinates by any rules or regulations other than that underlying all business activities, namely, to render their operations profitable.”—Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy, p. 46In this quote from his classic 1944 book Bureaucracy, Mises explains why private, for-profit businesses need not, and should not, be bureaucratic and entangled in rules and regulations mandated from the top of an administrative...

Council of States dissatisfied with bill to abolish imputed rental value Keystone-SDA Listen to the article Listening the article Toggle language selector...

Economists and the state are natural enemies. The central principle of economics is that the means for improving human well-being—what economists call “goods”—are naturally scarce and must be produced before they can be used to satisfy human wants. The scarcity principle also implies that, once produced, goods cannot be bestowed on one person without depriving some other person or persons of their use. In other words, there is no such thing as a free lunch. The state...

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...

Our Enemy, the Stateby Albert Jay Nock This year the theme of the Institute’s Supporters Summit was “Our Enemy, the State.” What better book review for this issue of The Misesian, then, than a discussion of Albert Jay Nock’s Our Enemy, the State, first published in 1935? In what follows, I’ll talk about some of the insights in that book.Nock draws a distinction between the state and society, though sometimes he describes this distinction as between the state and...

As the Washington drawbridge lowers for a second Trump administration, the world attempts to glean any insights that might indicate the direction of his second term. At the top of the list of concerns is the topic of sanctions.As of 2024, the US is actively sanctioning a third of all nations on earth. As the American populace grew more wary of military entanglements and forever wars, consecutive administrations have exponentially escalated the use of the economic...

This essay is adapted from a speech delivered at the Mises Institute’s Supporters Summit in Hilton Head, South Carolina, on October 12, 2024.“Printing Power” in our title has a double meaning: It can mean “printing power”—the power to print money, which central banks have. But we will focus on “printing power”—the central bank’s money printing as an essential source of the power of the state, including of course the Federal Reserve’s printing to promote the power of...

What Went Wrong with Capitalismby Ruchir SharmaSimon and Schuster, 2024; 384 pp.It is always encouraging when a non–Austrian School economist accepts through his own reasoning an essential tenet of Austrian economics. Ruchir Sharma, who is chairman of Rockefeller International, founder and chief investments officer of Breakout Capital, and a well-known economic journalist, is not an Austrian, though he is aware of Friedrich Hayek’s work. He lends strong support to...

All States Are Empires of Economic Lies—Tom DiLorenzoI’m going to start out by expressing my agreement with Doug Casey, who wrote about the economics profession of today. Most economists are political apologists masquerading as economists. They tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for more power.This has been going on for a long time. Here’s the founding document of the American Economic Association from the 1880s....

Zurich High Court discontinues cum-ex proceedings against Eckart Seith Keystone-SDA Listen to the article Listening the article Toggle language selector...