Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

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Cuts to Foreign Aid Are a Good Start

2025-03-18

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2025-03-18

On January 20th, the Trump administration indicated it would pause foreign aid to most countries for 90 days. Newly-confirmed Secretary of State, “Little” Marco Rubio, confirmed this and paused “all new obligations of funding, pending a review, for (U.S.) foreign assistance programs funded by or through the Department and USAID.”He also recently floated closing USAID permanently and merging it with the State Department. It is right to credit the...

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Ralph Raico’s Master Class on the History of Political Thought

2025-03-18

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2025-03-18

[This article is the introduction to The Struggle for Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought, by Ralph Raico, now available in the Mises Book Store, online at mises.org, and at Amazon.com.]It is appropriate, unfortunately, that Ralph Raico (1936–2016) begins this series of lectures with an anecdote about Lord Acton. Acton, as Raico notes, was an exceptionally erudite historian and a proponent of radical laissez-faire liberalism—also...

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Kennedy Assassination Mysteries

2025-03-18

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2025-03-18

Why should we care today about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963? That fateful day in Dallas is, after all, a long time ago: those of us, like me, who can remember the day are at least in their sixties. The short answer is that it reveals something essential for us to know about the American government and the Deep State that runs it.Kennedy had become deeply suspicious of the CIA and other American intelligence...

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Oops, Trump Just Bankrolled the Protesters He Intended to Silence

2025-03-18

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2025-03-18

I’ve been thrilled with much of what Donald Trump has done as president. He’s working to end the Ukraine war, secure the border, end the war on cryptocurrency, and cut government waste—all things I strongly support. But cutting federal funding over campus protests backfired so badly, it convinced Columbia’s most insufferable activists that they actually matter.Last Friday, the Trump administration announced it was cutting $400 million in federal...

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The New Higher Education “Arms Race”

2025-03-17

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2025-03-17

Forty years ago, collegiate institutions competed to attract the last big surge of baby-boomer 18-year-olds, offering campus amenities—fancy dormitories, swanky recreation centers with climbing walls, upgraded athletic facilities, palatial dining halls—that were, at the time, derisively described as an “arms race” among schools.I once asked the then-president of my own alma mater—an east coast liberal arts college—how the school justified spending...

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Thomas Aquinas and the Subjective Theory of Value

2025-03-17

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2025-03-17

Thomas Aquinas is, without doubt, the greatest Roman Catholic philosopher and theologian when it comes to the depth of his thought and the degree of his influence. Although this is the case, it might seem strange at first to see him mentioned in relation to the history of the subjective theory of value. It was Rothbard nonetheless who first pointed out that the direct ancestor of the Austrian School is the Salamanca School, a Roman Catholic school...

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Dismantling the Department of Education?

2025-03-17

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2025-03-17

President Trump’s proposal to dismantle the Department of Education is one step closer to an open, market-based system of education. The ultimate goal is a free-market system of education in which parents, teachers, and students are able to make their own choices about education, rather than being dictated by federal mandates.One of the most persuasive arguments against the Department of Education is that it holds on to a one-size-fits-all...

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Richard Murphy, The Bank of England, And MMT Confusion

2025-03-15

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2025-03-15

Professor Richard Murphy is a public supporter of Keynesian fallacies and MMT. He recently provided a glimpse into this increasingly popular perspective by alleging that the Bank of England is deliberately crashing the economy by reducing its Asset Purchase Facility (APF).The latest budget increased government spending, borrowing, and taxes. But as MMT advocates seek to unburden governments from borrowing and think that taxes should be used as a...

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We Can’t Fix International Organizations like the WTO. Abolish Them.

2025-03-15

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2025-03-15

In a recent Springer publication, Marcos Falcone proposed “Bringing the Austrian School into the 21st century” by embracing existing international institutions as a means of maximizing global liberty. Acknowledging that they are often justly criticized for being bureaucratic and ineffective, Falcone argues that they have historically contributed to economic growth and democratization and that all that is needed are two key reforms to strengthen...

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Free Markets Promote Peaceful Cooperation and Racial Harmony

2025-03-15

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2025-03-15

In Human Action, Ludwig von Mises highlights the importance of human cooperation as a prerequisite for the division of labor and free exchange. Without this, humanity remains mired in poverty:The “state of nature” that the reformers and utopians depicted as paradisiac was in fact a state of extreme poverty and distress. “Poverty,” says Bentham, “is not the work of the laws, it is the primitive condition of the human race.” Even those at the base of...

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The Precarious State of the American Economy

2025-03-15

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2025-03-15

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...

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Why Price Deflation Doesn’t Hinder Investment

2025-03-14

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2025-03-14

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...

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Trump is Wrong on Trade

2025-03-14

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2025-03-14

Trumps claims that America has lost high paying manufacturing jobs to China because the communist country promotes its exports through subsidies, tax advantages and currency manipulations. The reality is that we should not care what China does. The more China subsidizes its industries, the more its trading partners gain in the abundance of cheap goods and services and, contrary to what Trump believes, in the creation of high-paying jobs. In an...

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Trump’s False Tariff “Fairness” Argument

2025-03-14

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2025-03-14

President Trump’s argument for starting an international trade war is based on a socialistic-sounding plea for “fairness” and equality. Some foreign governments plunder their citizens with high tariff taxes on American imports, thereby forcing them to pay higher prices for those or competing domestic goods. The reason they are called “protective” tariffs is that they “protect” consumers from lower prices. When your foreign competitor is forced to...

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The Abominable Tariff

2025-03-14

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2025-03-14

[The Tariff Superstition: Why Protectionism Always Fails and Who Really Pays the Price by Marcel Kadosa. Translated by Bálint Téborski. Eger, Hungary, 2025. 159 pp.]Hungary in the years after World War I isn’t generally associated with a movement that supported the free market, but Bálint Téborski—whom we have to thank for The Tariff Superstition—tells us that,…this little gem of a book long forgotten for countless decades until we managed to...

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Lincoln’s New Deal

2025-03-14

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2025-03-14

In Frank W. Taussig’s The Tariff History of the United States, he describes the mass of unprecedented financial legislation that took place, which likely would not have occurred absent the context of the war,Probably no country has seen, in so short a time, so extraordinary a mass of financial legislation. A huge national debt was accumulated; the mischievous expedient of an inconvertible paper currency was resorted to; a national banking system...

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The Great Murray Rothbard

2025-03-14

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2025-03-14

Murray Rothbard was the chief architect of modern anarcho-capitalism, an uncompromising vision of a stateless society rooted in private property and voluntary association. He built upon classical liberal thought, particularly the ideas of John Locke and the individualist anarchism of 19th-century thinkers like Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker. However, unlike his predecessors, Murray fused these ideas with the Austrian School of economics,...

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Closing Signs Are Signs of the Times

2025-03-14

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2025-03-14

It was not long ago when signs for “Help Wanted” seemed to be in every store window. That is starting to be replaced in 2024 and 2025 with “Store Closing” signs. This switcheroo tells us volumes about how people and the economy are adjusting to the Fed’s money printing business. While the government and the wealthy elite benefit from the money printing, consumers and workers only seem to suffer.I do feel sorry for the rank-and-file workers in the...

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Tariffs Also Tax Capital, Not Just Consumption

2025-03-13

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2025-03-13

In a recent column, Paul Craig Roberts wrote that tariffs not only made international trade possible, but that they were merely a tax on consumption and were neutral elsewhere—and should be much-preferred to income taxes. He wrote:Trump sees tariffs in a different way than indoctrinated free-market economists. Tariffs don’t prevent trade. They ensure that countries have something with which to trade. Moreover, tariffs are a tax on consumption, not...

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Gold, Money, and the Nation-State

2025-03-13

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2025-03-13

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...

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