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 academic fields are devoted to reconstructing reality, to make reality fit their socialist ideals better. Those who wish to reconstruct reality argue, for example, that there is no reason why some animals should be regarded as “wild.” They argue that we should seek “new ways to think and act in a world dominated everywhere by human power and activity” and that there is no reason to exclude the animal world from that enterprise. Instead, “we have a responsibility to protect ‘wild’ animals from scarcity and disease and to preserve their habitats.” For example, Beka Jalagania argues in favor of special duties toward wild animals: “One such circumstance that is generally thought to create positive duties toward wild animals is the infliction of unjustified harms on these animals. In cases

Private property is the foundation of the libertarian society, and in Rothbardian theory, a libertarian society is one founded on absolute private property rights. In the libertarian society, all property is private property. Libertarianism is thus constructed on the principle of self-ownership: the libertarian society is a free society in which each individual is a self-owner. As Murray Rothbard explains in The Ethics of Liberty, “Obviously, in a free society, Smith has the ultimate decision-making power over his own just property, Jones over his, etc.”In that way, Rothbard establishes the foundations of an ethical political philosophy. His aim is “to develop libertarianism” as “a ‘science’ or discipline of individual liberty.” Rothbard conceptualizes liberty as a moral principle: “It