Category Archive: 6b.) Mises.org

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Jean-Baptiste Say: Neglected Champion of Laissez-Faire

2025-02-28

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2025-02-28

Beyond some rudimentary facts, very little is available in English about the life of J.B. Say.  He was born in Lyons, France, to middle-class Huguenot parents, and spent most of his early years in Geneva and London. As a young man, he returned to France in the employ of a life insurance company, and soon became an influential member of a group of strongly pro-free- market intellectuals.  Indeed, Say was the first editor of La Decade Philosophique ,...

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The Fort Knox Gold Was Stolen From the American People

2025-02-28

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2025-02-28

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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Let’s Be Realistic

2025-02-28

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2025-02-28

[The Lecturer’s Art: Gems of American History by Walter A. McDougall. Encounter Books, 2025. xxii + 291 pp.]The historian Walter McDougall is not a libertarian, but he criticizes the Progressives and Woodrow Wilson in a similar way to Murray Rothbard. He does so from the perspective of “realism.” Although people benefit from cooperation, realists maintain, their desires for wealth and power often lead them to act in ways that violate morality and...

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Educating for Liberty: Welcome and Opening Remarks

2025-02-27

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2025-02-27

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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How Much Gold Does the US Government Own, and Where Is It?

2025-02-27

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2025-02-27

Several key figures in the Trump administration have declared that the “gold at fort Knox” ought to be audited. I’m all in favor of this, but the gold at Fort Knox is less than sixty percent of the federal government’s gold holdings. The rest of the gold reserves needs to be audited as well.How Much Gold Is There?The US government has not performed a proper audit of its gold reserves since 1953. A partial audit occurred in the 1980s. The “audits”...

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A Practical Way to Protect the Worldwide Trading System

2025-02-27

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2025-02-27

In a previous essay, I pointed out that it is very likely that the US will isolate itself from the worldwide trading system due to its past—frankly unlawful—actions to steal the assets of other countries and the increasing assault on the purchasing power of the dollar. My goal was to recommend actions that the US government could adopt to reassure its trading partners that neither outright theft of assets or decline in the purchasing power of the...

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The Case for Immediately Closing the Central Bank

2025-02-27

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2025-02-27

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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The Gold In Fort Knox Does Not Back the Dollar or Anything Else

2025-02-27

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2025-02-27

I’m all in favor of a thorough and public audit of the US’s gold reserves. This includes the gold, not only at Fort Knox, but also at the other gold storage facilities at West Point, Denver, and the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Ron Paul was right when, in 2011, he tried to force the federal government to be transparent about its gold holdings.Virtually everything the US government owns is stolen, whether it’s stolen from Americans or from foreign...

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Auditing America’s Gold Is Not Just Important, It’s Critical

2025-02-27

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2025-02-27

An X exchange over the weekend is bringing new light to an issue long shrouded in mystery—the status of America’s purported stockpile of 8,133 tons of gold stored in Fort Knox and other government vaults across the country.News aggregator ZeroHedge tweeted at President Trump’s head of government efficiency, Elon Musk, “It would be great if @elonmusk could take a look inside Fort Knox just to make sure the 4,580 tons of US gold is there. Last time...

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Lew Rockwell, Champion of Liberty

2025-02-26

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2025-02-26

This summary of Lew Rockwell’s contributions to the liberty movement will show that Lew has done more to spread libertarian ideas than anyone else not named Ron Paul. Lew was born in Boston in 1944. His father was an “Old Right” Republican who gave Lew a copy of Henry Hazlitt’s classic Economics in One Lesson for for his twelfth birthday! Lew would later edit Hazlitt while working as an editor for the conservative publisher Arlington House. Lew...

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Trump Is Not Destroying Institutions; That’s What FDR Did

2025-02-26

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2025-02-26

Once upon a time, in a land known as Washington, DC, the experts wisely governed the people, and the people were happy. Everything from the nation’s nuclear arsenal to the Internal Revenue Service was run with precision and, most of all, trust. The happy people trusted the experts to always do the right thing which they did.But one day, all of that changed for the worse when the Bad People came to this happy land and turned everything upside down...

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How FDR’s Attack on the Gold Standard Spawned an Age of Inflation

2025-02-26

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2025-02-26

In his great classic, Crisis and Leviathan, Robert Higgs explained how Franklin Roosevelt’s attacks on the gold standard ushered in “the age of inflation” that has now robbed generations of Americans through the inflation tax. The explanation begins with the goofy economic theory that was the basis for the first New Deal: The backwards belief that low prices caused the Great Depression; therefore, if government could force prices up by restricting...

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Mr. Stiglitz, Is Hayek in the Room with Us?

2025-02-26

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2025-02-26

Daniel Dennett, the renowned philosopher of science, proposed four steps for critiquing an intellectual opponent: First, one should attempt to re-express the opponent’s position so clearly, vividly, and fairly that the opponent would say, “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.” Second, one should list any points of agreement, particularly those that are not widely acknowledged. Third, one should highlight anything learned from the...

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The New GOP-Organized Labor Alliance Will Not Help the Working Classes

2025-02-26

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2025-02-26

On Thursday, the Senate HELP Committee is set to vote on the nomination of Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s pick for Labor Secretary. Chavez-DeRemer was a Republican representative from Oregon who made a name for herself for being very pro-labor union compared to other members of her party.Trump’s nomination of Chavez-DeRemer is seen as one part of a broader political shift that now paints the GOP as a party chiefly concerned with the well-being of the...

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The New GOP-Organized Labor Alliance Will Not Help the Working Class

2025-02-26

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2025-02-26

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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The Gold at Fort Knox Was Stolen from Americans

2025-02-26

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2025-02-26

In recent days, President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Senator Rand Paul, and some others have pressed for an audit of the US gold reserves, with a special focus on the gold at Fort Knox. This is perfectly reasonable given that the US gold reserves—which are the property of the US Treasury and not the Federal Reserve—have not undergone even a partial audit in at least forty years.Part of the reason for the audit is to discover if any of the gold has...

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Listen to Talks From the Tampa Mises Circle

2025-02-26

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2025-02-26

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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Incubators for Socialism: Can the Universities Be Saved?

2025-02-26

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2025-02-26

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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Current Trends in Higher Education and Red State Strategies

2025-02-26

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2025-02-26

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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Training Young Economists

2025-02-26

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2025-02-26

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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