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.

Kamala Harris has suggested that, if elected, her administration would “pass the first ever federal ban on price gouging on food.” She has also stated that she would undertake several interventions into the healthcare industry, including a promise to “cap the cost of insulin at $35 for all Americans.”These proposals represent nothing other than the promise to institute price-fixing on groceries and aspects of healthcare. To end so-called “price gouging,” the government would have to fix the top rate permissible to ask for certain goods. All talk of attacking “price gouging” by politicians implies price fixing.The problem with price fixing is that it creates shortages and drives up the prices of other goods. Rather than reducing inflation, price fixing leads to shortages of the goods whose

As I argued in October of 2022, Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X) would represent an important test case for the freedom of speech on social media against the globalist, woke, and totalitarian agenda for the censorship of “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and “disinformation.” In that essay, I also predicted that one of the main obstacles for free speech on X would be the Digital Services Act (DSA) of the European Union (EU), as administered by the European Commission (EC):But the Digital Services Act threatens to universalize content moderation by social media and search engines, subjecting them to the EU’s stringent and anti-free-speech laws against “disinformation” and “hate speech,” which are not (yet) recognized legal categories in the United States. Given that Twitter [now X]

Let me begin by stating that I recognize national borders as arbitrary perimeters drawn by and around nation-states. I have no love for the state. In fact, the state should be abolished. I have declared, in no uncertain terms, that the state is a violent parasite that produces nothing—other than misery, that is. The state is an oppressive institution that, among other legitimated crimes, drains the social body of capital, extorts the productive elements of society, interferes in market transactions, distorts markets, and engages in wars to expand its power base and its control over the domestic population. This assessment is especially true of the United States.But I do believe in society. And I believe that society should be protected—from the state and from all others whose actions are

A little over six months ago, Claudine Gay was appointed president of Harvard University, the first black president of that now embattled institution. She recently resigned her post, only to retain a $900,000 salary as a professor. No doubt her appointment had more to do with the imperatives of an engulfing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda and less to do with the quality and volume of her scholarship, later found to be riddled with plagiarism.
Gay’s academic credentials are certainly not commensurate with the position of president at what was once one of the most venerated institutions of higher education in the United States and the world. With only one monograph and nine peer-reviewed single-author academic articles on her curriculum vitae, it would be a wonder how the

World elites gathered in yet another attempt to remake the world in a different image, with so-called climate change invoked as the catalyst for the meeting. As one can imagine, their "good" society is not very good for those who are not elites.
Original Article: COP28: Climate Catastrophism Wins as the World Loses

Ever since Elon Musk acquired Twitter, now X, the censorship regime has been hell-bent on harassing the company and Musk himself—with bad publicity, accusations of antisemitism, and advertiser boycotts. Musk struck back by threatening to sue the Anti-Defamation League, suing Media Matters for defamation, and famously telling fleeing advertisers “Go f*ck yourself.”
Musk’s X has the potential to weaken the Big Digital woke cartel, which censors content, censures and bans users, and serves as a propaganda arm of the globalist totalitarian statists whom the cartel so assiduously serves. I have argued that Musk’s X gambit would represent an important test case because it pits “the world’s richest man” against these woke cartel members and the state that benefits from their allegiance and

A hodgepodge of activism and legalistic negotiations characterized the 28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (UNFCCC COP28), which concluded Wednesday, December 13, 2023. The resulting agreement, dubbed the “UAE Consensus,” includes the first-ever UN statement in the 27-year history of climate summits to call for the “transition away” from fossil fuels. In fact, it marks the first climate agreement to specifically refer to “fossil fuels” as the culprit behind climate change. Nevertheless, since the language in the final agreement calls for the “phase down” rather than the “phase out” of fossil fuels, the more zealous contingents in attendance typically remained less than satisfied.
In ambiguous bureaucratese based on the speculative and largely unfalsifiable (unscientific) claims

Thousands of busybodies have descended on Abu Dhabi to forestall what they see as an imminent apocalypse. The twenty-eighth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC COP28) being held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), is presided over by its president, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, UAE Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and UAE Special Envoy for Climate Change. Al Jaber is also the chief executive officer of Adnoc, the state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, as well as the chairman of Masdar, otherwise known as the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, a state-owned renewable energy firm. The irony of an oil executive leading a meeting intended to eliminate fossil fuels from the world economy was not lost on

As this author previously has noted, the ideology of statism is responsible for much of the violence that plagues the world. We see this played out in Israel’s aggressive retaliatory attacks in Gaza in response to the October 7 killings by Hamas.
Original Article: Statist Ideology and War: Israel versus Hamas

This latest Middle East conflict is ultimately little more than gang warfare. We oppose it as a matter of principle.
Original Article: Statism Is the Cause of the Israel-Hamas War

As I wrote in my previous piece on statism and the Israel-Hamas conflict, states are organized crime rackets. Wars between states thus represent warfare between rival gangs. The proper libertarian position with reference to such gang wars is neutrality, or the opposition to all state parties to war. Neutrality includes opposition to interventionism, including opposition to sending arms and aid to other nations. Foreign aid increases the tax aggression on the taxpayers of the country that sends aid and increases the recipient state’s control over its own population and over those subject to its aggression.
But I asked a question in that piece that I did not fully answer: Does the libertarian position with reference to war significantly change in considering conflicts between states and

The State is an organized crime racket. It appropriates wealth by coercion and regularly uses force in violation of the n0n-aggression principle. The State is a parasite that perpetuates itself at all costs and extends itself by any means possible. Regardless of its putative leaders, the State grows and increases its power at the expense of its hosts and others who fall victim to its predations.
As Hans-Hermann Hoppe poignantly wrote, States are “gangs of murderers, plunderers and thieves, surrounded by willing executioners, propagandists, sycophants, crooks, liars, clowns, charlatans, dupes and useful idiots—[the State is] an institution that dirties and taints everything it touches.”
One of the State’s dirty occupations is war. When undertaking war, the State uses expropriated wealth and

Recorded in Nashville, Tennessee, on September 23, 2023. Includes audience Q&A period.

The Economic Coercion and ‘Repressive Tolerance’ of the Woke Regime | Michael Rectenwald

Video of The Economic Coercion and ‘Repressive Tolerance’ of the Woke Regime | Michael Rectenwald

With the appointment of Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s new CEO, Elon Musk is trying to appease woke advertisers to bring up his company’s revenues. This will not end well.

Original Article: "The Woke Cartel and Twitter’s New CEO"

American corporations are lavishing billions of dollars on leftist groups in the name of "equity." But many of them also are donating to even more questionable people and causes.

Original Article: "The Putrid Underbelly of Woke Capitalism"

Tucker Carlson has rankled the ruling elites for many years. But was his interview with Robert Kennedy Jr. a bridge too far?

Original Article: "Did Tucker’s Last Major Guest Lead to His Firing?"

On May 12, 2023, Elon Musk announced that Linda Yaccarino, the now former chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, would become the new CEO of Twitter. Musk’s appointment of Yaccarino followed an advertiser exodus that caused Twitter’s ad revenue to plummet by more than 60 percent from October 2022 through January 25, 2022, from around $127 million to just over $48 million. According to Pathmatics, by Sensor Tower, more than half of Twitter’s thousand advertisers pulled their ads from Twitter after Musk’s takeover of the social media company.
The flight of advertisers was due to concerns about Twitter’s content moderation and Musk’s so-called free-speech advocacy. In short, Musk’s supposed free-speech absolutism and his subsequent renunciation of the Democratic

Corporate intrigue reached a fevered pitch on May 6, 2023, in Omaha, Nebraska, when a shareholder was arrested during the annual shareholder meeting of Berkshire Hathaway. The shareholder challenged the affiliation of Warren Buffett with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Bill Gates’s association with Jeffrey Epstein, who was convicted in Florida for procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute, and who reportedly committed suicide in a New York jail while facing charges for sex trafficking and conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking.
Peter Flaherty, the chairman of the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), stood to offer proposal number eight, which called for the roles of Berkshire CEO and chair to be separated and held by two persons. Flaherty argued that the

Speculation is still swirling about why Tucker Carlson was cancelled by Fox News. The major mainstream outlets have credited his dismissal to a few leaked text messages and video footage revealing Carlson making “crude and offensive” comments off air. Some outlets pointed to the lawsuit brought against Fox and Carlson by Abby Grossberg. Still others claim that the Dominion Voting defamation suit was the impetus for the ouster. I have given a different explanation.
Those who consider the removal of Carlson from mainstream media to be nothing more than showbiz nonsense fail to recognize that one of Carlson’s last shows featured an interview with the highly controversial US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. If Tucker already posed a significant threat to the establishment with his

Recorded in Birmingham, Alabama on April 22, 2023.
From the Mises Institute’s recent event in Birmingham, Alabama dedicated to the global threat of "The Great Reset".

Why did Fox News fire Tucker Carlson? Some claim that Tucker had planned to leave the network all along, and merely resigned. He had even had a studio built in his own home. He was fed up with Fox and decided to call it quits, so the story goes. But this theory is belied by the fact that Tucker’s production team was taken entirely by surprise by the news. For instance, I received the following text message from Scooter Downey, a producer of Tucker Carlson Originals, in response to my query after the announcement: “No idea what’s going on. Crazy!”Bill O’Reilly, who hosted The O’Reilly Factor, which appeared in the same time slot as Tucker Carlson Tonight, remarked that Tucker and his staff were blind-sided by the decision. “They were putting together tonight’s, Monday night’s program,”

[This piece is an excerpt from The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty.]
The notion that the world can be replicated and replaced by a simulated reality says a great deal about the beliefs of those who promote the metaverse [treated in the previous chapter]. The conception is materialist and mechanistic at base, the hallmarks of social engineering. It represents the world as consisting of nothing but manipulable matter, or rather, of digital media mimicking matter. It suggests that human beings can be reduced to a material substratum and can be induced to accept a technological reproduction in lieu of reality. Further, it assumes that those who inhabit this simulacrum can be controlled by technocratic means. Such a materialist, mechanistic, techno-determinist, and reductionist

San Francisco, as well as the government of California, is calling for millions in "reparations" for black people in that state. Reparations, unfortunately, are fast becoming another anti-property-owner racket.

Original Article: "Reparations Are a Statist Cudgel for Bludgeoning Property Owners"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

San Francisco’s panel on reparations has issued a recommendation that qualified black residents in that city receive $5 million in reparations for the financial effects of slavery and/or racial discrimination. There was never slavery in the city of San Francisco, but the panel nevertheless suggested that city inhabitants must atone for racial discrimination. Such calls for reparations to black people are based on the notion of collective white guilt. But collective guilt is a false notion, and reparations based on it would violate the property rights of those whose ancestors gained nothing from slavery, even if such parties benefited from so-called discrimination.
Leftists and left-leaning liberals extol the merits of reparations. Like New York Times columnist David Brooks, they call for

We can be sure that the "natural elites" of which Hans Hoppe wrote are not among the Davos crowd. That group of "elites" has an agenda, and it is not liberty and free markets.

Original Article: "The Attack of the Subversive Elites"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

It is tempting, as Naomi Wolf has done recently, to ascribe the breakdown of Western civilization to the debasing of “Judeo-Christian” ethics and the reemergence 0f malignant supernatural forces. Witnessing the many assaults on the infrastructure and social order of the United States of late, I wouldn’t rule out metaphysical causality either. But to blame the pagan gods, or, in specifically Christian terms, to blame Satan, is to take comfort in an obscured perspective on the current global arrangement. To lay culpability strictly on gaseous, unknowable forces is to let the global elite off the hook.
As I write in The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty, the Western world is in the grips and under the control of “subversive elites.” With inordinate power and influence, these people

[This piece is an excerpt from Chapter 13 of The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda, to be released January 10, 2023.]
This chapter derisively refers to the notorious Great Leap Forward (1958–1961) as the Great Leap Backward. But China’s Great Leap Forward is not the ultimate object of my scorn. That scorn is reserved for the contemporary project conducted by people, who, if they knew anything about history, or cared about its results, would never propose this treacherous and potentially world-devastating campaign called the Great Reset—unless their intentions are evil and not merely misguided.
Meanwhile, I’m not the first to think of this appellation in connection with Mao’s Great Leap. That distinction may be held by a Soviet critic of Mao’s quixotic

As the author of Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom, I guess I should not be surprised to find myself squarely in the digital gulag—banished, perhaps permanently, from Twitter and Facebook. Twitter permanently suspended my account several weeks ago, mere days before Elon Musk took over the helm. Although I cannot be sure, I may have been banned because I suggested that the transgender movement is part of a multipronged neo-Malthusian depopulation campaign. (Note that I said nothing to or about any transgender individuals and thus broke no “Twitter rules,” whatever they may be. I may have been mistaken, but surely being “correct” is not a condition for major social media use. Or is it? Of course it is.)
Now Facebook has demanded proof that I am who I say I

By now it should be perfectly clear that the most prominent Big Digital companies are not strictly private, for-profit companies. As I argued in Google Archipelago, they are also state apparatuses, or governmentalities, undertaking state functions, including censorship, propaganda, and surveillance.

I’ll begin with a provocative thesis: socialism is ideological and free market thinking, while involving myth, is nonideological. I will show why socialism is ideological and why free market thinking involves myth but is nonideological by defining the terms myth and ideology and distinguishing them from each other.

In January 1956, the iconoclastic leftist American poet Allen Ginsberg wrote “America,” a prose poem that laments the state of the country and the poet’s place in it.

The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos is perhaps the world’s most unpopular conference, and the WEF’s founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab, one of the world’s most despised figures.

As should be clear by now, Francis Fukuyama’s declaration in The End of History: The Last Man (1992) that we had arrived at “the end of history” did not mean that classical liberalism, or laissez-faire economics, had emerged victorious over communism and fascism, or that the final ideological hegemony signaled the end of socialism.

Elon Musk’s bid to take over Twitter and turn it into a private company has apparently been successful. Now the real action begins. Musk’s buyout exposes the Big Digital media complex to unwanted and unwonted competition, while threatening to loosen its near-total control of information and opinion.

The quickest way to discredit an intellectual opponent is to accuse that person of being a "conspiracy theorist." But what happens when real conspiracies occur?

Original Article: "Do Conspiracies Really Exist? Murray Rothbard Thought So"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

In previous installments, I introduced the Great Reset idea1 and treated it in terms of its economic2 and ideological3 components. In this, the sixth installment, I will discuss what the Great Reset entails in terms of governance and the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4-IR), closing with remarks about the overall Great Reset project and its implications.

Any discussion of “stakeholder capitalism” must begin by noting a paradox: like “neoliberalism,” its nemesis, “stakeholder capitalism” does not exist as such. There is no such economic system as “stakeholder capitalism,” just as there is no such economic system as “neoliberalism.” The two antipathetic twins are imaginary ghosts forever pitted against each other in a seemingly endless and frenzied tussle.

The Great Reset is on everyone’s mind, whether everyone knows it or not. It is presaged by the measures undertaken by states across the world in response to the covid-19 crisis. (I mean by “crisis” not the so-called pandemic itself, but the responses to a novel virus called SARS-2 and the impact of the responses on social and economic conditions.)