Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is an early study of crowd psychology by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841 under the title Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. The book was published in three volumes: “National Delusions”, “Peculiar Follies,” and “Philosophical Delusions.”The first three chapters address economic events to include:The Mississippi SchemeThe South Sea BubbleThe Tulip ManiaThe remaining chapters describe mania that are essentially non-economic, including the witchcraft phenomenon. All chapters describe how crowds periodically lose their common sense.Were Mackay alive, he would probably recognize today’s trade war and the tariffs enacted by President Trump as being nothing more than the madness of crowds. Specifically,

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.

Fundamentally, there are only two forms of economic and political organization—centralized or distributed. The distributed model is based upon the principle of subsidiarity, which is, “an organizing principle that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority.” Governments today are in the centralized category. By contrast, the free market—to the extent it was allowed to operate in the age of classical liberalism—was a model of power distribution.The dominant form of government over recorded history has been monarchy. That began to change in the late 18th century with former British colonies in North America declaring their independence. Thirteen years later, the French Revolution erupted. Since then, centralized governments have thrived in

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.

For those who have any exposure to the subject, Adam Smith is the father of modern economics. Few have heard of Richard Cantillon. Both wrote on the subject of wealth creation, Cantillon in Essay on the Nature of Trade in General and Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Of the two, Cantillon, who preceded Smith, may have had a firmer grasp on the dynamics of wealth creation. Cantillon is considered the father of entrepreneurship, whereas Adam Smith seemed to go out of his way to dismiss the importance of that concept. With the benefit of two more centuries of economic experience, the twentieth-century economist Ludwig von Mises saw entrepreneurship in a light similar to Cantillon’s view: “Those who confuse entrepreneurship and management close their eyes to the economic problem. . . . The

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn may be the 1970 Nobel Prize winner for literature, but that does not make his work The Gulag Archipelago enjoyable reading. The detailed description of the methods of torture employed within the Soviet system alone will turn many readers away.

The response to the covid-19 outbreak is better understood as a tool of the national security state rather than as a public health measure.
Original Article: When Medical Authorities Went Totalitarian: Understanding Covid Policies and Protocols

Review: The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State
Senator Rand Paul mentions Aaron Kheriaty’s The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical State in his book Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up. Dr. Kheriaty’s online biography includes the following information:
Dr. Kheriaty is a plaintiff in the landmark free speech case Missouri v. Biden challenging government censorship on social media. . .. Dr. Kheriaty also serves in teaching and advisory roles at the Brownstone Institute, the Zephyr Institute, the Paul Ramsey Institute, and the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy.
For many years he was Professor of Psychiatry at UCI [University of California—Irvine] School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health, where he chaired the ethics

Ever wonder if you were living in the Dystopian States of America? Senator Rand Paul’s Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up, published October 10, 2023, does not disarm those haunting feelings.
This book is not for those who wish to place everything we have learned during the covid-19 control program in a memory hole. To the contrary, Paul is encouraging those who would pursue the truth to join him in confronting the difficult questions this period raises, including the origin of the covid-19 organism: did it arise naturally and spill over from an animal into the human species, or did it emerge as an accident from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). He further asks what our government has done to conceal its possible funding of the WIV “gain-of-function” research that was being done