Libertarian Links and Resources

Presented at Hillsdale College's Conference Commemorating the Centenary of the Birth of Ludwig von Mises on September 10, 1981. Special thanks to Bettina Bien Greaves for making this important audio recording available.

The sharp contrast that Alexis de Tocqueville drew in 1835 between the United States and Tsarist Russia—"the principle of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude"1—became much sharper after 1917, when the Russian Empire was […]

Free market economics is often ignorantly dismissed for being "ideological" rather than scientific. It probably sounds smart to the economically illiterate, but it is decidedly not. It doesn't mean nearly what most people assume it does. The word […]

One of the most common debates that has occurred in the United States for the past six decades is the discussion of the poverty rate. As the narrative goes, the US has an unusually high poverty rate compared to equivalent nations in the […]

During the early 1990s, as the world of the old Soviet Bloc was rapidly falling apart, Murray Rothbard saw it all for what it was: a trend of mass decentralization and secession unfolding before the world's eyes. The old Warsaw Pact states of […]

American politics is in crisis. Is this because of the Constitution, or in spite of it? For many libertarians, the Constitution is a dead letter. Nobody alive today signed it or consented to it. And politicians ignored it almost from the beginning. […]

The biggest political issue over the next fifteen years may be changing conditions that affect how much Social Security can pay. This would include the decline in the ratio of those who are paying into the system to those collecting. Once this was […]

The Committee on Energy and Commerce recently released more details of the so-called CLEAN Future Act, which “formally adopts the goal of achieving of a 100 percent clean economy by 2050.” Besides the manipulative […]

Key Takeaways And Actionable Insights Entrepreneurs create the future….. Tomorrow will be different. Tomorrow is created by entrepreneurs. From the high street store owner introducing new inventory to the high tech founder introducing new […]

When the Soviet Union began its collapse in 1989, the world witnessed decentralization and secession on a scale not seen in Europe since the nineteenth century. Over the next several years, puppet regimes and states-in-name-only broke away from […]

Liechtenstein has long been recognized as one of the most free and prosperous countries in the world. However, there has been little analysis of Liechtenstein’s development because the scant research that existed was in German and therefore […]

American politics is in crisis. Is this because of the Constitution, or in spite of it? For many libertarians, the Constitution is a dead letter. Nobody alive today signed it or consented to it. And politicians ignored it almost from the beginning. […]

Income inequality has been a hot topic for some time and it is a driving factor in the desire for economic policy reform across the globe. An uneven distribution of income seems to justify a top-down solution if it redistributes unfair allocations […]

According to the US Labor Department, worker productivity in the non-farm sector increased at an annual rate of 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter of 2019 after declining by 0.2 percent in the previous quarter. For the year, productivity increased […]

[Money, Inflation, and Business Cycles: The Cantillon Effect and the Economy, by Arkadiusz Sieroń. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. x + 162 pp.] Abstract: Austrian economists hold that money matters a great deal in concrete terms in […]

Economist Tim Terrell explains why the common rankings of "health outcomes" are so often biased against the United States, and why big businesses often support certain environmental regulations. Hint: it's not for reasons progressives will like. For […]

Socialist ideas have taken a hold on some of the more progressive members of the Democratic Party, namely Senator Bernie Sanders. The latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, however, may provide Senator Sanders with a reason for concern. Although 40 […]

Social Security, the primary retirement savings tool and biggest tax for millions of Americans, is a bad deal, critics contend. They argue that mandatory Social Security is a poor investment because it only provides an average annual income of some […]

There are myriads of words written about socialism, and yet lots of misconceptions about it still exist even in the minds of those who are on the opposite side of the political spectrum. The most striking and frequent blunders are the […]

In 2010, Chicago police commander Jon Burge was convicted on counts of perjury and obstruction of justice and sentenced to four and a half years in prison. Although he was convicted of lying under oath, his real crime was what he was lying about. […]

When we hear of political movements in favor of decentralization and secession, the word "nationalist" is often used to describe them. We have seen the word used in both the Scottish and Catalonian secession movements, and in the case of Brexit. […]

The year 1898 was a landmark in American history. It was the year America went to war with Spain—our first engagement with a foreign enemy in the dawning age of modern warfare. Aside from a few scant periods of retrenchment, we have been […]

[From chapter 23 of The Case Against the Fed.] Having examined the nature of fractional reserve and of central banking, and having seen how the questionable blessings of Central Banking were fastened upon America, it is time to see precisely how the […]

In honor of Valentine's Day, here is a touching tribute by Margit von Mises to her husband. To Margit, Ludwig's dearest quality was not his great wisdom, but his passion for humanity.  Given during an event honoring the republishing of his book […]

In December 2019, the US trade account balance stood at a deficit of $48.9 billion, against a deficit of $43.7 billion in November and $60.8 billion in December 2018. Most commentators consider the trade account balance the single most important […]

In attempting to promote the libertarian viewpoint, particularly in its anarchic variety, one is faced with a variety of problems. Some problems are theoretical and are well treated in the comprehensive literature;1 other problems, […]

[Conceived in Liberty: The New Republic, 1784–1791. By Murray N. Rothbard. Edited by Patrick Newman. Mises Institute, 2019. 332 pages.] We owe Patrick Newman a great debt for his enterprise and editorial skill in bringing to publication the […]

The Senate’s vote to acquit Donald Trump on both articles of impeachment this month brought a much-needed end to the tiring impeachment saga America has been subject to in the last few months. The impeachment controversy arose when […]

Summarizing insights from Mises, Hume, and La Boetie, Bob Murphy argues that even the worst tyrants ultimately stay in power because people obey them. If the people withdraw their support from a regime, it will fall. For more information, see […]

From the very beginnings of the socialist movement and the endeavors to revive the interventionist policies of the precapitalistic ages, both socialism and interventionism were utterly discredited in the eyes of those conversant with economic […]

Every time there is a budget debate, politicians from both parties will discuss the deficit and spending as if the first one did not matter and the latter could only increase. However, the main problem of the US budget in the past four decades is […]

In his State of the Union Address—February 4, 2020—President Trump outlined his reasons for punishing nations that manipulate their economies in order to achieve some internal policy goal, such as China. The president claimed that […]

In the wake of the Brexit vote, Scottish nationalists have renewed their calls for a new referendum on Scottish independence. But many remain unconvinced, and many claim Scotland is "too small" to be an independent country. Others claim […]

In his salient book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Joseph A. Schumpeter explained that introducing new methods of production and new commodities to the market is inconceivable under perfect competition. But the reality of real-world […]

Hunter Hastings and Mark Schaefer discuss how human-centered marketing can fix a business function that has lost its way. Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights Marketing has lost its way — in its current state, it’s no longer a useful […]

The Edge of Democracy, a documentary by Petra Costa produced by Netflix and nominated for an Oscar, has been released to hundreds of millions of unsuspecting viewers who know nothing of recent Brazilian history and have little to no access to […]

Don Boudreaux is an economist at George Mason University who blogs at Cafe Hayek. He has a long history with the Austrian and Public Choice schools, and is in the trenches daily making the case for free trade. For more information, see […]

[This article is part of the Understanding Money Mechanics series, by Robert P. Murphy. The series will be published as a book in late 2020.] In this chapter we will define some of the conventional “monetary aggregates,” such as M1 […]

Why do individuals value bread less than gold, when bread is obviously more “useful” than gold? To provide an answer to this question economists refer to the law of diminishing marginal utility. Mainstream economics explains the law of […]

Today’s brand of the left-leaning politician is all about substituting what sounds good for what actually works. Modern politics, whether in the US or Europe, is about taking a chainsaw to everything that produced even a modicum of […]

The Nation, which enthusiastically has supported every totalitarian communist regime that has existed in the past century (and that includes Pol Pot’s Cambodia and North Korea) is now firmly riding the Bernie Sanders bandwagon. This article, […]

Increasing numbers of Americans are losing sleep about the climate and agitating that healthcare is a human right. Residents of Flint, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey, want government to provide clean water, and again the rallying cry is that water […]

A common issue with economists and political economists from left to right is that they misunderstand the market economy as simply being a set of production processes. We see this in Lenin’s statement that the Soviet Union should be run like […]

In the conservative and libertarian movements there have been two major forms of surrender, of abandonment of the cause. The most common and most glaringly obvious form is one we are all too familiar with: the sellout. The young libertarian or […]

"Open borders" is a phrase usually heard in the context of international borders only. We hear far less about the issue of open borders between member states within a confederation or union of states. After all, no one thinks twice of crossing […]

I. INTRODUCTION The economics profession has recently neglected the connections between the purchasing power and the quality of money. In order to cover this gap, I will analyze the quality of money and how its changes affect the purchasing power of […]

Hordes of independent nurse practitioners are on the horizon. Many physicians are raising the alarm bell, but Dr. John Mandrola views things differently.

Murray Rothbard stated the nonaggression principle (NAP) in this way: No one may threaten or commit violence (“aggress”) against another man's person or property. Violence may be employed only against the man who commits such violence; […]

Everyone wants affordable housing, but how far will they go to attain it? For some, housing affordability is such a pressing issue that they will entrust politicians with the duty of providing it through legislation. Rent control is one of the […]

[Adapted from "A Practical Approach to Legal-Pluralist Anarchism: Eugen Ehrlich, Evgeny Pashukanis, and Meaningful Freedom through Incremental Jurisprudential Change" from the Journal of Libertarian Studies.] Born into a deracinated Jewish family in […]