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. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

Robert Nozick’s classic of political philosophy Anarchy, State, and Utopia turns fifty this year. His blasting of the redistribution of wealth shook academia to its core in 1974, and its intellectual tremors are arguably still being felt to this day. Nevertheless, Nozick’s arguments are clearly lost in the “real world”; high taxes and high benefits still run amuck. Indeed, even in the heyday of neoliberalism—the 1980s—Margaret Thatcher often justified her tax cuts on the basis that they advantaged the poorest in society. Did Nozick get it right in advocating for libertarianism, or did John Rawls really come to the correct conclusion in defending the social democracy that most states now embody? Little has not been written in the scholarly dispute; yet Nozick’s case remains close to totally