"The aim of all struggles for liberty is to keep in bounds the armed defenders of peace, the governors and their constables. The political concept of the individual's freedom means: freedom from arbitrary action on the part of the police power."
- Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) "Progress is precisely that which the rules and regulations did not foresee." [top]
Links
The Ludwig von Mises Institute ...is the research and educational center of classical liberalism, libertarian political theory, and the Austrian School of economics. Working in the intellectual tradition of Ludwig von Mises(1881-1973) and Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995), with a vast array of publications, programs, and fellowships, the Mises Institute seeks a radical shift in the intellectual climate as the foundation for a renewal of the free and prosperous commonwealth.
The European Ludwig von Mises Institute Homepage The LVMI Europe wants to advance a vision of a society of free and responsible individuals, based upon private property rights, limited government under the rule of law and the market order.
Ludwig von Mises: 1881-1973 This obituary appeared in "Human Events," October 20, 1973, p. 7, and is reprinted here in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Mises Institute, which will be celebrated October 18-19, 2002. - Murray N. Rothbard, October 15, 2002 [Mises]
Mises on the Vengeful State A state pursuing vegeance, he believed, threatens liberty itself. - Joseph R. Stromberg, April 19, 2002 [Mises]
Mises and Thucydides The famous calculation problem facing centrally planned economies, identified by Ludwig von Mises and his followers, and the famous tragedy of the commons hinted at early on by Thucydides and Aristotle and developed more fully by Garret Hardin, are, in effect, two sides of the same coin. - Tibor R. Machan, January 10, 2002 [Mises]
An Interview With Lew Rockwell "The Mises Institute was founded in 1982 because Misesian ideas needed a home and didn’t have one." - Marina Galisova for the Slovak Monthly OS, October 9, 2001
Revolt of the Misesians "What the Misesians have done in Guatemala is create an intellectual infrastructure that promotes a hard-core attachment to freedom among the business class, which dovetails very nicely with the working classes' instinctive opposition to taxes." - Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., October 9, 2001 [Mises]
Ludwig von Mises - Common Sense on Drug Prohibition "Governments which are eager to keep up the outward appearance of freedom even when curtailing freedom disguise their direct interference with consumption under the cloak of interference with business." - posted on May 2, 2001 [FreeRepublic]
Markets and von Mises:
In the Shadow of the Storm The last five years have mystified policy makers, hedge fund managers and central bankers alike. They do not pose such a mystery to followers of the Austrian theory of the Trade Cycle. - Sean Corrigan, May 31, 2000 [LewRockwell.com]
Mises at the Millennium And yet he was more than right. He was courageous. He was determined. He never gave up. And generations in the next century and beyond will know his name and his work, even as the likes of Keynes and Marx will someday be synonymous with the folly perpetuated by their ideas. - Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., March 1999 [The Free Market]
The Meaning of the Mises Papers "The personal, political, and scholarly papers of Ludwig von Mises have been discovered in a formerly secret archive in Moscow." - Hans-Hermann Hoppe, April 1997 [Mises]
Mises Vindicated If Ludwig von Mises were alive today, he could say: "I told you so." For in 1920, he wrote a long article on socialism, followed by a book two years later, that crafted socialism's tombstone. - Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., March 1990 [The Free Market]
Writings by Ludwig von Mises
Socialism vs. Market Exchange The last formal talk of Ludwig von Mises, delivered May 2, 1970 at an economic seminar sponsored by The Society of Praxeology in Seattle, Washington. - [Mises]
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992) "Perhaps the fact that we have seen millions voting themselves into complete dependence on a tyrant has made our generation understand that to choose one's government is not necessarily to secure freedom." [top]
No Third Way: Hayek and the Recovery of Freedom Hayek’s message for the next century is that there is no third way when it come to choosing between freedom or coercion, prosperity or stagnation. - Samuel Gregg & Wolfgang Kasper, Winter 1999 [The Centre for Independent Studies]
F. A. Hayek: Prophet of the Modern World [CATO] "Although sometimes characterized by his critics as a 'conservative,' Hayek always maintained that he was in fact an old-fashioned liberal, a believer in individual liberty, constitutionally limited government, and the free market of ideas and of goods." - Tom G. Palmer, May 8, 1999 [CATO]
Friedrich A. Hayek (1899-1992) "The best way to understand Hayek's vast contributions to economics and classical liberalism is to view them in light of the program for the study of social cooperation laid out by Mises. Mises, the great system builder, provided Hayek with the research program. Hayek became the great dissecter and analyzer. His life's work can best be appreciated as an attempt to make explicit what Mises had left implicit, to refine what Mises had outlined, and to answer questions Mises had left unanswered. Of Mises, Hayek stated: 'There is no single man to whom I owe more intellectually.' The Misesian connection is most evident in Hayek's work on the problems with socialism. But the insights derived from the analysis of socialism permeate the entire corpus of his work, from business cycles to the origin of social cooperation." - Peter J. Boettke [The Freeman]
Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) "The necessary consequence of an egalitarian program is the decidedly inegalitarian creation of a ruthless power elite." [top]
The life and times of
Murray N. Rothbard ...who showed why private individuals can do just about everything that needs to be done. - Jim Powell, 2001 [Liberty Story]
Murray N. Rothbard:
Mr. Libertarian Rothbard's implementation of the 'policy' of libertarianism to specific issues was scattered, in large measure, throughout hundreds of articles. It was also expressed in the powerful For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, which is probably the work best known to libertarians. - Wendy McElroy, July 6, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]
Murray N. Rothbard: A Legacy of Liberty Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995) was just one man with a typewriter, but he inspired a world-wide renewal in the scholarship of liberty. During 45 years of research and writing, in 25 books and thousands of articles, he battled every destructive trend in this century -- socialism, statism, relativism, and scientism -- and awakened a passion for freedom in thousands of scholars, journalists, and activists. [Center for Libertarian Studies]
The Whiskey Rebellion:
A Model for Our Time The Whiskey Rebellion, then, considered properly, was a victory for liberty and property rather than for federal taxation.- September 1994 [LewRockwell.com]
"Isolationism," Left and Right "ISOLATIONISM" WAS COINED as a smear term to apply to opponents of American entry into World War II. Since the word was often applied through guilt-by-association to mean pro-Nazi, "isolationist" took on a "right wing" as well as a generally negative flavor. - from Chapter 14 of For a New Liberty
Bastiat's Plow "Bastiat was able to peer through the fluttering veil of money to see that people borrow it for the goods they can acquire with it." - Gene Callahan, August 7, 2001 [Mises]
Bastiat Was Right ...his writings speak to us today, and help explain why the recent conflict with China has ended through diplomacy and peace rather than belligerence and war. - Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., April 13, 2001 [LewRockwell.com]
The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt "A large, diverse collection of Henry Hazlitt's essays from The Freeman, with auxilliary essays on Hazlitt by other authors. Produced after Mr. Hazlitt's passing." (e-text courtesy of the Henry Hazlitt Foundation)
Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851-1914) "Present goods are, as a rule, worth more than future goods of like kind and number. This proposition is the kernel and centre of the interest theory which I have to present. All the lines of explanation, by which I hope to elucidate the phenomena of interest, run through this fact." - from Positive Theory of Capital, 1889: p.237 [top]
Wilhelm Röpke: A Centenary Appreciation Wilhelm Röpke was more than just an economist. During some of the darkest decades of the twentieth century, he sounded more like an Old Testament prophet warning of the dangers from a loss of our moral compass. Collectivism had few opponents in our century with as much of a sense of ethical purpose. Precisely because he was an economist by training, Röpke understood the indivisibility of personal, political, and economic freedom in a way that many other critics of socialism in its various forms could never articulate. - Richard M. Ebeling [LibertyHaven]
The Methodology of the Austrian School Economists - Carl Menger The foundations of the Austrian School of Economics were laid, and the blueprint for its future development drawn, with the publication in 1871 of Menger's Grundsätze der Volkswirthschaftslehre (English translation, Principles of Economics). - Lawrence H. White
Say's Law for Our Time The idea of resorting to work and entrepreneurialism as a means to material well-being has historically become a poor second to the idea of acquiring resources through theft. - Sean Corrigan, September 5, 2002 [Mises]
Austrian Economics Is Empirically Verified This article is a response to Joe Dunsmore's recent article "Why We Can't Associate Too Closely with the Austrians." Contrary to his article, I claim that Austrian economics is in fact an empirically verified science. - David Rogers, February 20, 2003 [anti-state.com]
Choice and Preference Bryan Caplan, in his widely circulated web article, "Why I Am Not an Austrian Economist," and in his subsequent "The Austrian Search for Realistic Foundations" in the Southern Economic Journal, seemingly has questioned the Austrian contention that choice implies preference. - Gene Callahan, February 20, 2003 [Mises]
Demand-Side Dogma Coercive transfers are wasteful, inefficient, and inequitable. The Left uses Demand-Side Dogma to instill false legitimacy into these policies, writes D.W. MacKenzie. The Right, including the Bush administration, plays along with this rhetoric all too often. - D.W. MacKenzie, January 20, 2003
The Austrian Difference Austrian analysis provides a superior basis for correctly informing the general population about why capitalist societies are the best societies. - D.W. Mackenzie, December 26, 2002 [Mises]
Explaining Japan's Recession Only the Austrian theory of the business cycle provides the explanation. - Benjamin Powell, December 3, 2002 [Mises]
Models: What Are They Good For? How can we reconcile the market success of mathematical models of trading with the Austrian skepticism toward theoretical models expressed in math? - Gene Callahan, September 23, 2002 [Mises]
The War Over Method D.W. MacKenzie contrasts economic methodologies to show how Austrian economists employ sound theoretical concepts that guard against the wiles of political and ideological fashion. - D.W. MacKenzie, July 25, 2002 [Mises]
Econometrics: A Strange Process Until recently, most macroeconomic forecasters, assisted by mathematical models, were predicting economic recovery and rising stock indices. But the market has reminded us that reality doesn’t always correspond to the predictions of those who claim the mantle of "science." As is so often the case, those economists who were more humble in their pretensions to knowledge avoided such embarrassment. - Robert P. Murphy, July 17, 2002 [Mises]
Professor Stiglitz and Lord Keynes According to the Keynesian magic formula, writes Frank Shostak, government spending is all that is needed to make a society prosperous. Even today this position has prominent defenders, such as Joseph Stiglitz. If this view were correct, however, poverty in the world would have been eliminated a long time ago. - Frank Shostak, June 4, 2002 [Mises]
The Misleading Indicators Contrary to the accepted way of thinking, the indicators approach adds very little to our understanding of what business cycles are all about. - Frank Shostak, May 20, 2002 [Mises]
In Defense of Logic Carried out properly, a course in logic can greatly improve a college student's ability to think independently, as an individual and not simply a herd-member, and not be taken to the cleaners by every fashion to come along. - Steven Yates, April 17, 2002 [Mises]
Mathematics and Economic Analysis ...as Rothbard and Mises note, that might be appropriate for the physical sciences, it is not appropriate when describing how humans behave. - William L. Anderson, April 4, 2002 [Mises]
FEE's Role in the Survival and Resurgence of Austrian Economics "FEE's identification with Austrian Economics has been unmistakable from its very beginning. The appreciation of how free markets contribute to societal prosperity has been taught by FEE primarily as seen through Austrian lenses...If today Austrian Economics has returned to a substantial measure of professional recognition and respect, the Foundation for Economic Education is entitled to a major share of the credit."
Why Austrian Economics Matters "The future of Austrian economics is bright, which bodes well for the future of liberty itself. For if we are to reverse the trends of statism in this century, and reestablish a free market, the intellectual foundation must be the Austrian School. That is why Austrian economics matters." - [Mises]
Austrian economics and its suppression in Australia "Unfortunately for the country the whole frame work and language of the so-called economic debate has been set largely by Keynesians of one stripe or another. Even those who claim to have abandoned Keynesian nostrums have not fully freed themselves of Keynesian thinking. (For example, we have had John Stone and Alan Wood make the ridiculous statement that Japan's problems have been aggravated by its high savings ratio.)" - [New Australian]
