Spoken Mises

Murray Rothbard discusses the critical turning point in Republican politics: 1946-1950. In the realm of direct politics, it seemed clear that there was only one place for those of us not totally disillusioned with political action: the "extreme right wing" of the Republican Party. It was solidly isolationist and opposed to foreign wars and interventions, and roughly free-market and libertarian in domestic affairs. The most important fact to realize about the Old Right in the postwar era is that it staunchly and steadfastly opposed both American imperialism and interventionism abroad and its corollary in militarism at home. On the question of the Cold WAr, there were two surprising voices of sanity apart from Senator Taft: Robert P. Kennedy, Sr., and former president Herbert Hoover.

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The Postwar Renaissance II: Politics and Foreign Policy (6.96 MB)

State interference in education usurps the child's rights and displaces the custodial role of the parents in exercising those rights, writes Jeffrey Herbener. That the state would seize the custodial rights from the parents demonstrates that it has its own interests in mind. The state must resort to force because neither the child nor the parents want the natural arrangement to be overturned. Because the state rests on compulsion its activity extinguishes the very basis for the development of the personalities of children, which is freedom. Moreover, state officials lack the knowledge of and concern for the child possessed by his parents. The state has no interest in developing the personalities of children or in catering to their interests and aptitudes. The state does not desire them to participate in the social order by their free associations. The state funds and regulates formal education to further its own interests and attain its own ends.

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Misesian Economics in Truly Private Schools (4.63 MB)

The war years had brought economic hardship to Mises, and if he ever had any illusions about the state of the American mind before he came to the United States in 1940, he had certainly lost them by the end of the war. American public opinion was already entirely under the sway of statism. And as a consequence the old American liberties were at an all-time low. As Mises wrote to a German correspondent: "Unfortunately one can become acquainted with the fruits of the planned economy here in the U.S.A. too." Similarly, to a promising young economist in Austria he wrote that the American literature on economics was, if anything, worse than the European

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Birth of a Movement (17.02 MB)

Murray Rothbard on the immediate postwar period: For a while the postwar ideological climate seemed to be the same as during the war: internationalism, statism, adulation of economic planning and the centralized state, were rampant everywhere. During the first postwar year, 1945–46, I entered Columbia Graduate School, where the intellectual atmosphere was, oppressively, just more of the same. It was in this stifling atmosphere that I first became aware that I was not totally alone; that there was such a thing as a libertarian "movement," however small and embryonic.

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The Postwar Renaissance I: Libertarianism (7.84 MB)

If Garet Garrett (1878–1954) is known at all today, it is by those who are captivated by the handful of intellectuals who wrote in opposition to the New Deal planning state and the regimentation of national life it brought about. They were a rare breed, but there is much more to Garrett than people know. He was a great novelist as well, who treated commercial life as a center of fantastic heroism and creativity. His opposition to the New Deal was not merely reflexive but born of his love and understanding of liberty. Indeed, writes Jeffrey Tucker, Garrett he is a case study in a forgotten genius. He should rank among the master novelists and politico-economist journalists of the last century. Ludwig von Mises recognized this: "His keen penetration and his forceful dirct language are...unsurpassed by any author."

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Who Is Garet Garrett? (5.60 MB)

Fires are natural in that they have always occurred on earth, and will continue to occur. The real problem with the current fires, writes William Anderson, is government. Governments — in the name of "scientific" and "ecological" management — have grossly mismanaged the natural environment. Environmental policy has operated on the assumption — as so eloquently stated by Lew Rockwell — that "private ownership is the enemy." He writes that environmentalists believe that nature is an end in itself. Indeed, we see the handiwork of such policies: utter destruction of human and animal habitat. Those endangered species that the law was supposed to protect are swallowed up along with the million-dollar houses that environmentalists hate. So much for the state that "protects" nature. In fact, government has dealt with the natural environment in much the same way that the US Armed Forces dealt with Vietnam: they have destroyed it in order to "save" it.

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Fires of the Feds: How the Government Has Destroyed Forests (2.52 MB)

Gary Galles writes of this central idea in economics: Once, when my newborn son was barely back from the hospital, I was holding him in my arms with my wife looking on. I asked him, "Can you say marginal rate of substitution?" My wife recognized that as a bit of economics jargon and accused me of trying to turn our son into an economist like me. While it was said as a little joke between the two of us, the longer I teach and write, the more I seriously wish people actually thought in such marginal terms, because many of the times that we confuse ourselves and others are due to our failure to do so.

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Can You Say Marginal Rate of Substitution? (1.98 MB)

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Land Socialism: Playing With Fire (1.09 MB)

On Tuesday September 18, writes Frank Shostak, US central bank policy makers surprised financial market players by cutting the federal funds rate target by 0.5% to 4.75%. The key motivating factor behind the hefty cut in the federal funds rate target was an economic model that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke developed while in academia. Bernanke is of the view that changes in financial and credit conditions are important in the propagation of the business cycle through a mechanism that he dubbed the "financial accelerator. In his view, it is by means of the "financial accelerator" that a sudden short-lived disruption in financial markets can set in motion a prolonged disruptive and amplified effect on the real economy. The question that must be asked is what gives rise to the emergence of such conditions? Disruptions in financial markets do not emerge out of the blue. We suggest that the major cause that sets these disruptions in motion is likely to be the central bank itself.

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What's Behind the Fed's Aggressive Interest-Rate Cut? (2.22 MB)

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., speaks of the past and future of the Mises Institute: Mises knew that it is not enough to hold the right views, though this is an essential step. It is just as important to do everything possible to see that these views are propagated and made compelling in a way that will transform society and politics. And this is why he became an advocate of a new institution that would be dedicated to liberty. This institution, he hoped, would not only be a source of new ideas. It would work to bring them about and realize them within the affairs of the human population. The marketplace for ideas is built entirely upon ideas that have been discovered, heralded, and disseminated, and thereby become part of the structure of the world in which we live. In the same way that an entrepreneur cannot be content to merely imagine a shopping mall or a new search engine, but must also see these dreams realized economically and then marketed, in that same way we must not and cannot be content to merely hold sound views. We must work to see them realized.

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The First and Next 25 Years (5.35 MB)