February 11 would have been the 96th birthday of Burt Blumert, one of my greatest friends and a great champion of Rothbardian libertarianism. (He actually died in 2009.) Some of my readers, especially the younger generation, might not recognize his name, because Burt was a quiet man who worked to do good behind the scenes. In this week’s column, I’m going to tell you about Burt—both what he did and what he was like as a person.Burt is an example of what Mises and Rothbard hoped for, an entrepreneur dedicated to the intellectual cause of freedom and free enterprise. That cause started to become clear for Burt when he enlisted in the Air Force to avoid being drafted into Truman’s slave army during his war on North Korea. As a member of a socialist organization, Burt saw that a society

The recent murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Health Care, has led many people to claim that private health insurance is an example of what is wrong with the free market, and that we ought in consequence of its manifest failures to institute a government run single-payer system. Some ghoulish leftists went so far as to post messages on Twitter expressing joy that Thompson had been killed. The Daily Mail reports: “The assassination of UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson has triggered tasteless celebrations and bad taste support for the gunman who killed him.Mr. Thompson was shot outside the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan on Wednesday morning by a masked assassin, who remains on the run and whose motive has not been disclosed.As news of the cold-blooded killing spread, thousands

The unusually extensive “pardon” by lame-duck “President” Biden has been much in the news lately, but the pardon is not the main issue we should be interested in. The real issue is that the Bidens, both father and son, are evil. Hunter’s Biden’s “lost” laptop—which 501 “security professionals” falsely claimed was a Russian fake —reveals warmongering brazen in its duplicity.Concerning the pardon, only this need be said. Of course no one should be prosecuted for tax “evasion.” You are entitled to all your income, as the great Murray Rothbard has taught us. But there is nothing special about being the president’s son. Everybody convicted of tax evasion should be pardoned and nobody should be prosecuted for it. Even better, we should abolish the IRS. the CIA, and the NSA.Before he issued the

Naomi Wolf is a truly heroic figure, and the publication of her great book The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity makes her heroic stature even more evident than it was before. I’m not going to write a detailed review of the book, because it consists of thousands of documents that a lawsuit she initiated compelled Pfizer to release. I’ll just mention a few of the highlights. Pfizer knew a couple of months after its vaccine was ruled “safe and effective” by the FDA that the vaccine “risked heart damage in young men.” By the way, the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization ruling bypassed the usual FDA procedures, which require ten to twelve years of testing until a new vaccine is approved. Pfizer and other companies in Big Pharma had their bases covered, in case of lawsuits for

Lame duck “President” Joe Biden and his gang of neocon controllers, overcome by hatred of Donald Trump and the near certainty that, if they do not act now, the Ukraine War will soon be settled, have set in motion a process that could destroy the world in a nuclear Armageddon.As everybody knows, Donald Trump wants to terminate the Ukraine war, and he wants to accomplish this by negotiating a settlement in which Ukraine would give up some disputed territory also claimed by Russia in return for a withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. Both sides would gain from this settlement, and a long and costly war would end.But brain-dead Biden hates Trump and still wants the pro-Nazi Zelensky regime to conquer Russia, thus preserving American world hegemony. Of course, this won’t happen, but

Donald Trump is a strong believer in protective tariffs, and this is very bad news for those of us who support the free market. In Trump’s opinion, tariffs are a great idea. Here is what he said about them in an interview last month: “Trump has proposed a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on all imports and 60 percent on goods from China. During Tuesday’s remarks, he singled out imported cars for higher trade duties, saying he would slap a100, 200 or 300 percent tariff on cars made in Mexico. He also floated imposing 50 percent tariffs on goods to force companies to relocate operations to the U.S. to avoid the penalty.‘First of all, 10 percent when you collect it is hundreds of billions of dollars … all reducing our deficit,’ he said. ‘But really, so there’s two ways of looking at a

Like many of you, I was happy that Donald Trump won the election. Kamala Harris is a committed Marxist, supporter of baby killing, and passionate advocate of the woke ideology. In foreign policy, she would have been guided by the neocons who control brain dead “President” Joe Biden.But we shouldn’t be complacent. Trump is far from ideal, and we need to do all we can to work against the policies he favors that are inimical to a free society. Beyond that, we need to work for a fully libertarian society, as advocated by Murray Rothbard and Ron Paul.Let’s first look at Trump’s bad areas, and a good place to start is foreign policy. One bright spot is that he wants to settle the Ukraine war, instead of supplying the pro-Nazi Zelensky regime with billions of dollars and shipping them American

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.

The election is upon us. We wonder whether we have to have war, tariffs, and deficit spending, regardless of whom we support. What are we to do? Faced with the intractable problems of misgovernment, we need to look deeper. Following the great Murray Rothbard, we should ask, do we need a State at all? Rothbard’s answer was a clear “No.” And not only do we not need a State; the State is a menace.Following Franz Oppenheimer and Albert Jay Nock, Rothbard identified the State as a predatory organism. It is the “organization of the political means.” The State produces nothing by itself but takes what other people have produced. Froom this we can deduce a vital fact. Society must have existed before the State. Otherwise, there would be nothing for the State to take.But you may wonder, how is this

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.

In recent years, a disturbing development has taken place in America’s universities. People who apply for faculty positions, and those who are on the faculty and want to be promoted are required to make “diversity statements,” in which they declare their commitment to DEI—diversity, equality, inclusion—and detail their activities on behalf of this goal.Here is an example of this: at UCLA, applicants to the faculty have to sign this: “Diversity statements usually are no more than two pages and speak to your experience, capabilities, and commitment to working with people from different backgrounds and to advancing a more inclusive, diverse and/or equitable academic environment. You can demonstrate these values through your teaching, research, and service. Keep in mind that diversity can mean

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.

[Editor’s note: This article originally ran on LewRockwell.com on July 28, 2000. Even before the Bush-Gore election wrapped up, Rockwell put his finger on what the Republicans had in store for America. For those who paid attention to Rockwell in this period, they were not shocked when the Bush administration came out in favor of the TSA, the Patriot Act, the NSA, the destruction of the Fourth Amendment, and more. 9/11 was an excuse to impose a police state on America, but it was something Bush and his allies had always wanted. If Trump wins next month, let’s hope he has learned his lesson about the Cheneys, the Pences, and all the rest of the Buckleyite, Bushian GOP. ~R. McMaken] All things equal, it looks like a shoe-in for George W. Bush.So I’m wondering: is it too early to start hating

Some people argue like this: Although the Fed as it now exists is very bad, a nation needs a central bank to regulate its money supply, and the Fed is better than nothing. That being so, we should try to urge the Fed to adopt a non-expansionary monetary policy. In this view, calls to “End the Fed” are mistaken. I’m sure most of my readers already know what I’m about to say, but, just to be clear, that view is disastrously wrong. We do not need a central bank, and to argue in the way indicated is to betray the great Murray Rothbard and the great Dr. Ron Paul, whose slogan “End the Fed” has galvanized so many of us.What we need is the classical gold standard, based on 100% reserve banking. There is no need for an expansion of the monetary system, even a gradual expansion. In fact, monetary

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.

Many people oppose the free market because it leads to inequality of wealth and income. It is unfair, they say, that some people have vastly more money than others. Some defenders of the free market respond that these inequalities, while undesirable in themselves, make the poor better off than they would be otherwise, and so should be accepted. Another argument made by defenders of the free market is that restricting inequality would interfere liberty, so that, although inequality is bad, we have to put up with it.While it is true that inequality makes the poor better off and that restricting inequality interferes with liberty, these are not the best arguments that defenders of the free market should use. They accept that inequality is bad, but we should reject this assumption. There is

Most readers of my weekly column already favor a libertarian society, with either a strictly limited government or no government at all. They realize what a disaster the state has been. What are the philosophical foundations of this outlook? There are many possible answers, but in this column, I’m going to discuss three of the most important of these, the way Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe address this issue. I’m not going to take a stand on which is best but just set forward the different views and leave the choice to you.I’ll begin with Mises, as most readers will find this the easiest to understand. Suppose you want to do something, e.g., go for a drive in the country. Why do you want to do it? There are any number of possible answers to this. We can continue

The Old Right was a principled band of intellectuals and activists, many of them libertarians, who fought the “industrial regimentation” of the New Deal, and were the first to note that, in America, statism and corporatism are inseparable. Despite some current claims, however, these writers ardently defended capitalism, including big business and corporations, celebrated the profit motive, and took a strict laissez-faire attitude towards international trade. They loathed tariffs, and saw protectionism as a species of socialist planning.Frank Chodorov was a central intellectual figure on the Right from the 1920s to the 1950s, editing the early Freeman magazine and founding Human Events and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. A prolific writer, Chodorov guided two generations of students

These days, supporters of President Trump and others on the right are often smeared as “fascists,” and what is meant by this is that they support the Nazis. For example, the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat says: “To get people to lose their aversion to violence, savvy authoritarians also dehumanize their enemies. That’s what Trump is doing. Hitler used this ploy from the very start, calling Jews the ‘black parasites of the nation’ in a 1920 speech. By the time Hitler got into power in 1933 and translated dehumanizing rhetoric into repressive policies, Germans had heard these messages for over a decade.As a historian of autocracy with a specialization in Italian Fascism, the use of the ‘vermin’ image got my attention. Mussolini used similar language in his 1927 Ascension Day speech which laid out

In 1981, when I was thinking about starting the Mises Institute, the two things that really motivated me were, one, that I thought that the Austrian school was diminishing in influence in this country and other countries.

Once again, the presidential selection process has given us a contest between two people who agree on the pressing need to expand the entire welfare-warfare state. They can argue about priorities, but they agree on the overall goal. With the campaign lacking serious issues, something tells me that the great American obsession over race is going to play a major role, which is gravely unfortunate since the discussion is unlikely to be enlightening.Of course it’s all politics, that is, equal parts dissembling and illusion, and designed to confer on some groups more power over other groups.But it does raise important questions: what is racism and how can we tell if it exists? I’m not talking about someone who dislikes African-Americans or whites or Latinos. We might call that racism on the

In a free society, people have the right to decide what to do with their own bodies. If you want to take something that “orthodox” medicine says you shouldn’t, this decision should be up to you. If the government can ban “dangerous drugs,” why not dangerous ideas too? As the great Ludwig von Mises points out, “Opium and morphine are certainly dangerous, habit-forming drugs. But once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. A good case could be made out in favor of the prohibition of alcohol and nicotine. And why limit the government’s benevolent providence to the protection of the individual’s body only? Is not the harm a man can inflict on his mind

“Woke” people claim that they want to wake up racial and sexual minorities to the way they are being discriminated against. Because of past and present exploitation, blacks and other “protected” groups are not getting what rightfully belongs to them. The solution to this is that the better off, especially if they are white, should have their wealth and income seized and given to those they are exploiting.The woke position rests on a fundamental fallacy. This is that there is a fixed amount resources, so that if the rich have more, the poor have less. But this is wrong. Resources in the free market are not a fixed sum. So long as the economy is growing, everybody can benefit. The ‘protected’ can do better without taking away what the rich have earned. The economist Paul Rubin, who died last

Socialists and other leftwingers support taxation of the income and wealth of the well off. They say that they want to promote “equality” and “social justice,” but in fact they are motivated by envy. They want what others have. They can’t stand the thought of other people’s having more money than they do.Here is what Rob Larson, an economics professor at Tacoma Community College, says about certain very expensive apartments: “Besides the return of in-city mansions for the affluent and their cars, New York and London have also seen the growth of ‘poor doors.’ These are entrances to new luxury buildings, erected with a city requirement to include some affordable housing units for regular working people, in addition to ‘market rate’ units that sell for seven figures and

The term “revisionism” came into use after World War I, when historians like Harry Elmer Barnes, Sidney Bradshaw Fay, and Charles Austin Beard challenged Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, which assigned exclusive guilt to Germany and its Kaiser for the outbreak of the world war, with all its appalling destruction and massacres, It was on the basis of that clause that the Treaty imposed on Germany a Carthaginian peace, memorably condemned by J.M. Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace.Barnes and Fay felt a sense of betrayal. They had been roped into Woodrow Wilson’s crusade to “make the world safe for democracy” by the Committee on Public Information, headed by George Creel, and a similar body that coordinated the work of American historians. Now they saw the error of their

Originally published at LewRockwell.com.Kamala Harris is bad enough, but stress on her manifest deficiencies should not make us lose sight of the problems with her running-mate, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, who would become president if Kamala were elected and something happened to her.Walz is a “progressive” of the worst sort, close to being an outright communist. During the notorious Geroge Floyd riots after BLM (Black Lives Matter [but White Lives Don’t] nearly destroyed Minneapolis and St. Paul, Walz allowed the BLM to run rampant and refused to send in state police and the state national guard to protect white lives and property. As an account in Politico put it, “A report by Minnesota Senate Republicans three weeks before the election argues that DFL Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis

DEI stands for “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion.” This is the view that members of certain “oppressed” groups, like racial minorities and women, should get preferential treatment. In blunt language, we should give jobs to incompetent people. Kamala Harris is a perfect example of a DEI hire. She is an incompetent black woman. Mark Thiessen does a good job of explaining why she is incompetent; “Harris is undeniably vulnerable. She ran a catastrophic campaign for president four years ago, flaming out before even reaching the Iowa caucuses. Her public approval has hovered around that of Biden, who is himself one of the most unpopular presidents in 70 years. She is also less popular than former president Donald Trump, the man she must beat. Indeed, The Post’s recent average of 11 polls conducted

On Sunday, July 21, a letter appeared on brain-dead “President” Joe Biden’s Twitter account purporting to be a message that he would not be running for re-election but would continue in office until his term expires next January. Shortly thereafter, another post appeared that said he endorsed his DEI hire Kamala Harris as his successor. It is more than a little strange that Biden made no appearance on television to announce these momentous news items. It would not be surprising to find out that he is as yet unaware of them.But assuming the posts are indeed authentic, the question arises, would Kamala Harris make a good president? It is clear that she would not. As the great Murray Rothbard has taught us, war and peace is the key issue of our time. Harris has revealed an abysmal ignorance

Democracy is not the best political system, and its defects have been amply exposed in Hans-Hermann-Hoppe’s great book, Democracy: The God That Failed. But we do live in a democracy, for better or worse, and in this system, the winner of an election is entitled to take power. The Left doesn’t accept this. If they oppose a candidate, they will subject him to venomous hatred and suggest that it would be a good thing if he was killed. We saw this is the barrage of anti-Trump attacks shortly before his attempted assassination, such as brain-dead “President” Joe Biden’s call to put Trump in a bull’s eye. I’ll cover some of these threats to Trump later, but first, I’d like to give some historical examples of how the Left operates in “democracies.”In the 1930’s, the rightist Calvo Sotelo gave a

The attempt to assassinate Donald Trump and his heroic response to it are uppermost in our minds. We don’t yet know the details of who was involved in the attempt on his life, though I suspect that the “lone gunman” theory will turn out to be false. But the sad event offers us a chance to reflect on something that we do know, and that may well be relevant to the attempt on the former—and we trust soon to be next—president’s life: The CIA has been involved in numerous assassination plots since its inception.One of these plots is especially important in current circumstances. The CIA is implicated in the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963. Jacob Hornberger has done a great deal of research on this topic and here is what he says. “Why would the CIA snuff out the life of

[This talk was delivered at the Future of Freedom Foundation‘s conference on “Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties,” on June 6, 2008, in Reston, Virginia.]The US central bank, called the Federal Reserve, was created in 1913. No one promoted this institution with the slogan that it would make wars more likely and guarantee that nearly half a million Americans will die in battle in foreign lands, along with millions of foreign soldiers and civilians.No one pointed out that this institution would permit Americans to fund, without taxes, the destruction of cities abroad and overthrow governments at will. No one said that the central bank would make it possible for the United States to be at large-scale war in one of every four years for a full century. It was never

In American culture, public schools are praised in public and criticized in private, which is roughly the opposite of how we tend to treat large-scale enterprises like Walmart. In public, everyone says that Walmart is awful, filled with shoddy foreign products and exploiting workers. But in private, we buy the well-priced, quality goods, and long lines of people hope to be hired.Why is this? It has something to do with the fact that public schools are part of our civic religion, the primary evidence that people cite to show that local government serves us. And there is a psychological element. Most of us turn our kids over to them, so surely they must have our best interest at heart!But do they? Murray N. Rothbard’s Education: Free and Compulsory explains that the true origin and purpose

Editors Note: This week, we are celebrating Lew Rockwell’s 80th Birthday and the debut of our trailer for Playing With Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve. Click here to learn more.I’m sure that you have had this experience before, or something similar to it. You are sitting at lunch in a nice restaurant or perhaps a hotel. Waiters are coming and going. The food is fantastic. The conversation about all things is going well. You talk about the weather, music, movies, health, trivialities in the news, kids, and so on. But then the topic turns to economics, and things change.You are not the aggressive type so you don’t proclaim the merits of the free market immediately. You wait and let the others talk. Their biases against business appear right away in the repetition of the media’s

Some libertarians argue that libertarianism requires support for “open borders,” but this is a mistake. “Open borders” is the view in the existing world of states, the state ought to admit as many people who want to come to the United States as possible. Of course, you don’t have the right to occupy property that is privately owned. But much of the property in the United States is “public,” which means that it is up to those who run the state to decide what to do with it. Of course, this is an unsatisfactory situation and we should do what we can to bring about a world with no “public” property and no state, but for now the question is what to do: open borders or not?The answer is quite clear. “Open borders” would be a. disastrous mistake. The policy would subject the United States to

Editors Note: This week, we are celebrating Lew Rockwell’s 80th Birthday and the debut of our trailer for Playing With Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve. Click here to learn more.It seems incredible that in the last days, a fundamental right of the whole of humanity, the freedom of association, has been denounced by the New York Times and all major opinion sources, even as a national political figure was reluctant to defend his own statements in favor of the idea, and then distanced himself from the notion. Has such a fundamental principle of liberty become unsayable?Or perhaps it is not so incredible. An overweening government, in an age of despotism such as ours, must deny such a fundamental right simply because it is one of those core issues that speaks to who is in charge:

Editors Note: This week, we are celebrating Lew Rockwell’s 80th Birthday and the debut of our trailer for Playing With Fire: Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve. Click here to learn more.This was the keynote address at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s new building dedication and conference on the great Austrian economists, June 5-6, 1998, in Auburn, Alabama. * * * *We come together at a crucial time in the history of the Mises Institute and the history of liberty. This weekend, we dedicate a new home, which we see as a new headquarters of the Austrian School of economics and the scholarship of liberty. We are deeply grateful to all who have made it possible. You show your commitment to the ideas that underlie the free and prosperous commonwealth of Mises’s vision.The conference

Last week, a most disturbing development took place that should concern all those who value liberty. The House of Representatives passed the National Defense Authorization Act and included in it a provision requiring the automatic enrollment of men from 18 to 26 years old for the draft. Before that, men were required to register for the draft when they turned eighteen, but whether to do that was up to them. Many of them didn’t, even though failing to register subjected them to criminal penalties. But the choice was theirs to make, and now, they won’t have it.No one has actually been drafted yet, but calls for “national service” are in the air. This is an excellent time, then, to go over what is wrong with drafting people into the armed services, and this is what I’m going to do in this

Last week, a conversation with a waitress disturbed me a lot. She told me that she was homeschooling her sixteen-year old son, who is autistic, because she was afraid that he would be subjected to “tranny” propaganda and encouraged to “transition” to being a woman. Even worse, he might be put in touch with “doctors” who would mutilate him by injecting him with hormones and even castrating him, all without his parents’ knowledge. You might think the waitress was exaggerating—we all know that public schools are bad, but can they be that bad? If she is right, the schools would be monstrously evil. They would be downright satanic.She is indeed right. In what follows, I’ll discuss the “tranny” movement and what they are doing to our children. It’s a tale that will upset you, but you need to

In recent days, we have had brought home to us what “show trials” are like. They are not confined to Soviet Russia and it satellite countries during the Cold War but are a very present reality to us in America today.

A recent story revealed that one-third to one-half of the students at the prestigious UCLA School of Medicine are unqualified. These students belong to racial and ethnic minorities; most are blacks and Latinos. One student couldn’t identify a major artery when questioned by a surgeon during an operation.Would you want a “doctor” like that to treat you? Isn’t the purpose of a medical school to train competent physicians? Why, then, were these unqualified people admitted? The answer is that the medical school was following the DEI guidelines. “DEI” stands for “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” and supports preferences for racial minorities. The school wants certain kinds of “diversity” and not others. It certainly isn’t looking for students who oppose racial set-asides, even though they

Rick Rozoff recently sent me a message that helps us understand a basic feature of socialized medicine. It is closely associated with death. Socialists complain that the free market makes medical care “too expensive” for the poor and middle class. Because of this, they propose to provide “free” medical care for everybody. Of course, it isn’t free. It’s either paid for by taxes or inflation, which is itself a cruel tax.But once the “free” care is offered, there is a problem. At a zero, or very low, price, there will be much more medical services that people demand than can be provided. Suppose, for example, that you are having back pains. Should you get an MRI taken of your back? If you had to pay for the test yourself, you would hesitate. But if it is available “free,” why

The House of Representatives passed the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act” on May 2, by a vote of 320-91 in reaction to demonstrations on numerous university campuses and elsewhere against the brutal and genocidal policy of Israel in Gaza. The Act has now been sent to the Senate, where it seems certain to pass. This is an extremely dangerous bill that could criminalize the Bible, many Christian Churches, as well as any negative remarks about Israel and Jews. In brief, it threatens us with totalitarian thought control. We must do everything we can to oppose it.First, let’s take an overview of the Act. It adopts the very broad definition of anti-Semitism of the “International Holocaust Remembrance Association.” The Act calls this definition “a vital tool which helps individuals understand and

Anti-war students have been staging protests and demonstrations on a great many university campuses throughout America. A number of so-called “conservatives” have called for the police to arrest the students. Zionists groups accuse the students of “anti-Semitism” and demand that they be expelled from school. In fact, libertarians should welcome these protests. They bring back memories of the Vietnam War student protests that participated in, brought down the war-criminal LBJ.The student protests today are actually quite moderate. They call for an end to genocide in Gaza and recognition of the rights of Palestinians who have been killed and had their land taken away from them. Let’s look at an example, the demonstrations at Columbia University, which are ongoing as I write.Here is a

April 22 was Earth Day.. Brain-dead “President” Biden issued a proclamation about it. This said:“More than 50 years ago today, some 20 million Americans came together across the country to demand that we prioritize our planet’s well-being. They came from every walk of life and political background, and were united around a common vision: to protect the Earth and our natural treasures for future generations. Their actions that day ignited an environmental movement and proved that nothing is beyond our capacity if we do it together. Today, we carry on their legacy by building a greener, more sustainable planet and, with it, a healthier, more prosperous Nation.” See here.I’m confident readers of LRC won’t be fooled by this. Protecting the environment sounds good, if you don’t know what the

Many Americans care about the dangers of mass immigration. Are they right to be concerned? In what follows, I’ll try to show that they are right. Immigration of elements hostile to American values does indeed pose a grave threat. But, if we are libertarians, don’t we have to defend “open borders”? I will argue that we don’t.One of the most obvious reasons mass immigration is a problem is its immense cost—hundreds of billions of dollars. A post from November 2023 that appeared on Judicial Watch explains:“Mass illegal immigration resulting from the Biden administration’s open border policies is costing American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars to provide an unprecedented number of migrants with medical treatment, housing, education, and other welfare services, not to mention law

In these days of rampant inflation, it’s imperative that we return to the gold standard—and the real thing too. By this I mean the classical gold standard, not the so-called “gold exchange” standard, and with no fractional reserve banking, just as the great Murray Rothbard wanted. In what follows, I’ll discuss some of the economic issues below, but it’s important to realize that it’s a moral issue as well.I spoke about the difference between the classical gold standard and the fake gold standard. This might seem a technical issue, but it’s one of vital importance. Joe Salerno, the leading contemporary Austrian School authority on monetary economics and Academic Vice President of the Mises Institute, explains:“The historical embodiment of monetary freedom is the gold standard. The era of

According to “Britannica,” multiculturalism is “the view that cultures, races, and ethnicities, particularly those of minority groups, deserve special acknowledgment of their differences within a dominant political culture. See this. In fact, “multiculturalism is a gigantic hoax. The people behind it, including brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers, want to impose a totalitarian tyranny on us, telling us whom we can and cannot associate with. If you are white, you have no rights; your “culture,” according to these forces of evil, doesn’t exist. If you oppose mass immigration, you are a vile racist.According to the great black economist Walter Williams, writing in 2015, multiculturalism aims to destroy Christianity and Western civilization:“President Barack Obama surprised

Biden and Trump have clinched the nominations of their parties for President. Everybody is gearing up for a battle between them for the election in November. It’s obvious that Biden is “cognitively impaired.” In blunter language, “brain-dead”. Partisans of Trump are gearing up for a decisive victory. But what if this battle is a sham? What if Biden’s elite gang of neo-con controllers won’t let Biden lose?How can they stop him from losing? Simple. If it looks like he’s losing, the elite forces will create enough fake ballots to ensure victory. Our corrupt courts won’t stop them. They have done this before, and they will do it again, if they have to.I said the Democrats have done this before. The great Dr. Ron Paul explains one way they did this in 2020. The elite covered up a scandal that

Leftwing academics claim that blacks in America are oppressed. They call for reparations and affirmative action programs to help them. But these people are hypocrites and liars. How do we know this? When a black person doesn’t share their views, they act ruthlessly.

In these times of war in the Middle East, I often think of my late friend, the great and brilliant Joe Sobran.  If Joe could be with us today, it’s clear what he would be saying. Why does the US support Israel uncritically? How is doing so in our national interest? What about the rights of Palestinians to their land?How do we know he would say these things? Because this is exactly what he did said in 2002.“In my 21 years at National Review, I had a front-row seat. I watched closely as Bill Buckley changed from a jaunty critic of Israel to what I can only call a servile appeaser. In its early days, the magazine published robust editorials blasting politicians who sacrificed American to Israeli interests in order to pander to the Jewish vote; in those days it was considered risqué to suggest

Julian Assange may soon be extradited to the United States, where he will face prosecution that could end in his imprisonment for life. He is in fact a hero, who should be honored rather than punished. American foreign policy is based on the pursuit of global hegemony and to achieve this goal, our “leaders” engage in torture and murder. Assange brought these crimes to public attention through his publication of the “WikiLeaks” documents he got from Bradley Manning. Because of this, the American government, now headed by brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers, wants to destroy him. In what follows, I’ll explain the facts of the case and why they are important and detail the persecution of Assange.Chris Hedges outlines what is at stake:“The nearly 15-year-long persecution of

[This speech was delivered at the Mises Institute on the 50th anniversary of the publication of Human Action in 1999.  This year, May 16-18, join Dr. Joseph T. Salerno, Dr. Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Dr. Jörg Guido Hülsmann, Dr. Mark Thornton, and more for a conference in honor of the 75th anniversary of Human Action at our campus in Auburn. Space is limited. Register here.]
In a 1949 memo circulated within Yale University Press, the publicity department expressed astonishment at the rapid sales of Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action. How could such a dense tome, expensive by the standards of the day, written by an economist without a prestigious teaching position or any notable reputation at all in the United States, published against the advice of many on Yale’s academic advisory board, sell so

I often think of the great Henry Hazlitt, a hero and supporter of the Mises Institute. He was a tireless voice of reason. He once said at a Mises birthday celebration, “We have a duty to speak even more clearly and courageously, to work hard, and to keep fighting this battle while the strength is still in us. Even those of us who have reached and passed our seventieth birthdays cannot afford to rest on our oars and spend the rest of our lives dozing in the Florida sun. The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of liberty, which means the future of civilization.”
Henry Hazlitt never retired to the beach, and his great voice, once described by Ludwig von Mises as “the

I often think of the great Henry Hazlitt, a hero and supporter of the Mises Institute. He was a tireless voice of reason. He once said at a Mises birthday celebration, “We have a duty to speak even more clearly and courageously, to work hard, and to keep fighting this battle while the strength is still in us. Even those of us who have reached and passed our seventieth birthdays cannot afford to rest on our oars and spend the rest of our lives dozing in the Florida sun. The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of liberty, which means the future of civilization.”
Henry Hazlitt never retired to the beach, and his great voice, once described by Ludwig von Mises as “the

"On the free market, everyone earns according to his productive value in satisfying consumer desires. Under statist distribution, everyone earns in proportion to the amount he can plunder from the producers."
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.
Teaching in New York, Las Vegas, Auburn, and at conferences around the world, Rothbard led the renaissance of the Austrian School of economics. He galvanized an academic and popular

Lew Rockwell appears on NOW with Bill Moyers. Lew discusses Bush, Iraq, and the US economy. Originally broadcast on March 7, 2003.
"We have to educate ourselves, and educate others about our own history, our real history, about what’s actually going on these days, about real economics, and the principles of liberty. And I think that is: if we have any salvation, it’s through that, and certainly in secular terms."

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In 1996, we produced a documentary titled Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve. For the next ten years, we distributed copies all around the world, to our students, our members, and the public. Thousands of people were introduced to the evils of the Fed and central banking. At that time, not many people or organizations were calling for the abolition of the Federal Reserve. The Mises Institute was. And that hasn’t changed.
Eventually, the documentary was posted on YouTube in February 2006, and it remains one of the Mises Institute’s most popular videos. We’ve had viewers from more than eighty countries. There’s even a Russian version of the film! From the most rural US town to Kathmandu, this documentary has exposed the dangers of central banking.
Of course, a lot has changed since

My title seems odd. How could Murray Rothbard comment on the Ukraine War, when he died in 1995? Of course, he can’t comment on current events. But the principles this great thinker wrote about tell us what he would say about today’s American foreign policy. He would tell us to stop sending money and arms to the Ukraine and to end all sanctions against Russia. What goes on in that region is none of our business. Getting involved risks a nuclear war that would destroy the world.
Murray made the case for non-intervention in this way:
“The libertarian position, generally, is to minimize state power as much as possible, down to zero, and isolationism is the full expression in foreign affairs of the domestic objective of whittling down state power. In other words, interventionism is the opposite

The weaponization of money is the issue of our time. The politicization of the dollar doesn’t only make us poorer; it empowers the evilest actors in society and undermines the most important foundations of civilization.
As Dr. Ron Paul has noted, “It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.”
This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of Murray Rothbard’s classic work What Has Government Done to Our Money?, and this is still one of the most important questions we can ask today. We need your help getting this book into the hands of a new generation. Our new edition has a preface by Guido Hülsmann, a foreword by Patrick Newman, and an afterword by Joe Salerno.
Your donation will help print and ship 100,000 paperback copies of this important

When I opened the first Mises University, I could only dream about how many students would participate, how many classes would be taught, and how many lives would be changed for the better. Now as we plan the thirty ninth event, we need your help.
It was obvious students were not learning real economics and were even being taught lies in the classroom. Mises and Rothbard were being ignored for Marx and Keynes. This had to change.
Thanks to Mises University, students no longer have to depend on mediocre and even evil professors at state-run colleges and universities to teach what they call economics.
Our faculty teach at Mises University because they are passionate about Austrian economics and want to help educate the next generation. Their lectures aren’t stale and boring. They encourage

Politics is of its very nature biased in favor of intervention and planning. Even in its “minarchist” or “night-watchman” version, politics is based at root on the idea that some decisions must be made coercively and imposed on unwilling minorities — or even majorities, as the case may be. This is contrary to the principle we observe in private life every day: the consent of both parties is necessary for a transaction to take place.
The state never stays “limited” in the long or even medium run, as we’ve seen for ourselves, and before long it worms its way throughout civil society. Once it becomes entrenched in some area of social life that had previously been managed by voluntary means, people grow accustomed to the state’s new role, even coming to view it as indispensable. The spirit of

We’re supposed to go along with Green Energy schemes—as we did with masks, school lockdowns, and vaccinations to stop covid—because our government, media, and “public interest” groups insist that we “follow the science.”

Original Article: "How Greening the Economy Will Destroy America"

Brain-dead Biden and his gang of neocon controllers want to “green” the economy. They use the phony “climate change” hoax, aka “global warming,” as the excuse to do this. Their plans will destroy America’s economy, which is dependent on fossil fuels. They talk a lot about helping the poor and arouse people to hate the rich. But destroying our country’s economy won’t help the poor.
Brain-dead Biden’s proposed Inflation Reduction Act ( IRA) is supposed to give us cheap “green” energy. But it will, in fact impose limitless costs. As fossil-fuel expert Alex Epstein points out, “We were told that the IRA would give us cheap ‘green’ energy for ‘only’ $400 billion in subsidies.
In reality, the IRA has a limitless price tag due to its 1) a limitless number of years, 2) limitless dollars per year,

The great Dr. Ron Paul has been right about all the major issues that confront the world today. He is right about the Fed, the Ukraine war, the FBI, and so much else. How has he managed to do that? What has given him wisdom unique on the political scene today? The answer is simple.

Forty years ago, I was worried. I had had the honor of working with Ludwig von Mises. But, not long after his death, the greatest economist and defender of freedom in the twentieth century was being ignored.
Some years before, I had worked for the great Neil McCaffrey at his Arlington House Publishers. One day, I was called into his office and asked, “How’d you like to be Ludwig von Mises’s editor?”
I was to correct and bring back into print three of the great man’s books—Bureaucracy, Theory and History, and Omnipotent Government—and publish his new monograph on the history of the Austrian School.
When the books were published, Leonard Read held a celebratory reception, and I had a private dinner with Ludwig and Margit von Mises. They represented an old and better world.
I was just

At the heart of the Christmas story rests some important lessons concerning free enterprise, government, and the role of wealth in society. Let’s begin with one of the most famous phrases: “There’s no room at the inn.” This phrase is often invoked as if it were a cruel and heartless dismissal of the tired travelers Joseph and Mary.

When economic crises hit, most pundits and intellectuals never see it coming. That is because they have never learned the lesson that Bastiat sought to teach, namely that we need to look beneath the surface, to the unseen dimensions of human action, in order to see the full economic reality.

For seventy-plus years, the case of Franklin Delano Roosevelt has vexed people of a libertarian bent. His policies, extending war socialism based on Mussolini’s economic structure, expanded the American state to an unthinkable extent and prolonged the Great Depression through the horrific World War II.

The modern institution of the presidency is the primary political evil Americans face, and the cause of nearly all our woes. It squanders the national wealth and starts unjust wars against foreign peoples that have never done us any harm. It wrecks our families, tramples on our rights, invades our communities, and spies on our bank accounts. It skews the culture toward decadence and trash. It tells lie after lie. Teachers used to tell school kids that anyone can be president. This is like saying anyone can go to Hell. It’s not an inspiration; it’s a threat.
The presidency—by which I mean the executive State—is the sum total of American tyranny. The other branches of government, including the presidentially appointed Supreme Court, are mere adjuncts. The presidency insists on complete

We all want freedom for ourselves, but many people have doubts about the way others might use their own freedom. Under these conditions, the state is there to help. Get enough people to favor enough restriction, and the state is good to go, administering every aspect of life from its smallest to its largest detail.

Murray Rothbard died in January 1995, long before this year’s coronavirus scare. But the principles this great thinker taught us can help us answer questions about the coronavirus outbreak which trouble many of us. Would the US government be justified in imposing massive involuntary quarantines in order to slow down the spread of disease? What about vaccines?

Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito

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