Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s recent concurring opinion in the Biden vs. Knight decision sent hopeful tremors across conservative legal circles and drew condemnation from libertarians. Was Thomas finally laying the groundwork for regulation of Big Tech, which conservatives correctly view as both deeply biased against them and actively biased in favor of left-wing causes?
At first blush, the case primarily concerned First Amendment questions about whether former president Donald Trump (while in office) could block certain individuals or groups from following his Twitter account.1 The Blockees argued that a sitting president should not be able to prevent access to “news” he creates on social media, especially when

Donald Devine is a legend in Washington, DC conservative circles, where he gained fame wrestling civil service bloat as head of Reagan’s Office of Personnel Management. His new book The Enduring Tension: Capitalism and the Moral Order  starts with Schumpter’s creative destruction and asks the tough question: can capitalism alone hold America together? Channeling Hayek, …

Recorded at the Mises Institute on March 19, 2021. Includes an introduction by Tom Woods.

Niall Ferguson holds a PhD in philosophy from Oxford, taught history at Harvard and NYU, and wrote perhaps the definitive biography of Henry Kissinger.
So, naturally, Bloomberg hired him to write on economics.
His most recent column for Bloomberg is a strained mix of the Scot’s views on inflation, tempered slightly by a welcome skepticism toward Jerome Powell’s dismissal of the threat. Ferguson is still gun-shy from an exchange with Paul Krugman back in 2010 over inflation, but he’s at least willing to challenge Powell’s unwarranted reassurances. Yet as Ferguson wends his way through an examination of yields curves and velocity, and the “breakeven” inflation rate, readers get the strong impression he’s offering nothing more than

Niall Ferguson holds a PhD in philosophy from Oxford, taught history at Harvard and NYU, and wrote perhaps the definitive biography of Henry Kissinger. So, naturally, Bloomberg hired him to write on economics. His most recent column for Bloomberg is a strained mix of the Scot’s views on inflation, tempered slightly by a welcome skepticism …

The GameStop saga—can we call it an insurrection?—wants easy heroes and villains. Both are available. Original Article: “Playing Games with Stocks” This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.  

This week we celebrate the life of Murray N. Rothbard, born on the second of March 1926, a Tuesday, in the Bronx.
And what a Bronx it was, teeming with brilliant intellectuals, dedicated Communists, and rock-solid middle-class Americans like David and Rae Rothbard. The family would later become friendly with their apartment building neighbor in Manhattan, one Arthur F. Burns. Burns, an economist at Columbia, was destined for a political career at the Council of Economic Advisers under Eisenhower and as Federal Reserve chairman, appointed by Nixon. Tellingly, Burns was also the man who later nearly sabotaged Rothbard’s dissertation at Columbia. By the standards of academic economists, he certainly reached the height of his

The GameStop saga—can we call it an insurrection?—wants easy heroes and villains. Both are available.
The populist version of the story goes like this: a few thousand angry gamers, colluding via the now infamous WallStreetBets subreddit, brought at least one powerful hedge fund to its knees. Melvin Capital and other short sellers, completely blindsided, lost a reported $5 billion in what must have seemed like a sure-bet opportunity for their model of vulture capitalism.
Meanwhile GameStop, the plucky brick-and-mortar retailer thought to be going the way of Blockbuster Video, gained a reprieve from its looming execution date. Robinhood, the “free” app masquerading as a stock trading platform for the little guy, was exposed as a

Suddenly the champions of stakeholder theory, like the predictably despicable Washington Post, find themselves singing a new tune about vulture capitalists, deciding that hedge fund short sellers are now the good guys. Original Article: “The GameStop Saga Unravels Stakeholder Theory” This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.  

The GameStop saga shows some “equity” movements are more equal than others. Stakeholder theory, the corporate version of social justice, attempts to install this hopelessly amorphous concept of “equity” in the business world. Equity, unlike equality, demands different treatment of individuals and different distribution of resources based on need, identity, and historical injustices. But now …

Will Biden/Harris be a transformative administration? Original Article: “What Biden/Harris Will Do” This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.  

Paraphrasing the late Murray Rothbard, the “two party” system in America during the twentieth century worked something like this: Democrats engineered the Great Leaps Forward, and Republicans consolidated the gains. Wilson, Roosevelt, and Johnson were the transformative presidents; Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan offered only rhetoric and weak tea compromises. In politics, being for something always beats …

We will never water down our message to satisfy censors or maintain a particular platform; instead we will work around them. Original Article: “Surviving Tech Purges: What We’re Doing at the Mises Institute” This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.  

Listen to the Audio Mises Wire version of this article. The Mises Institute was born of the “build your own platform” ethos. In the early 1980s few outlets existed for anyone interested in the Austrian school of economics or robust libertarian scholarship. Few universities taught Hayek, much less Mises or Rothbard. Libraries and bookstores carried little of interest for …

Mobilization and separation, not persuasion, is the way forward. Original Article: “2021: Welcome to Post-persuasion America” This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.  

Welcome to 2021 in post-persuasion America!   I first heard this term used by Steve Bannon, architect of the surprising 2016 Trump campaign, in a PBS Frontline documentary titled “America’s Great Divide.” Speaking way back in the pre-Covid days of early 2020, Bannon asserted the information age makes us less curious and willing to consider worldviews unlike our own. We have access to virtually …

Professor Janek Wasserman’s book The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas, is an entertaining and fascinating account of key players and events in the evolution of Austrian school economics. Jeff Deist details the good, bad, and ugly of the book, written by a left-progressive historian from a critical perspective.  Read Jeff …

[Excerpt from a talk by the same name delivered at the Mises Institute’s annual Supporters Summit, Jekyll Island, Georgia, October 9, 2020.] I’d like to talk to you this afternoon about two classes of Americans, and it may not be the two classes you think of, but nonetheless, there are two distinct classes in America, …

YouTube, the dominant video platform owned by Google, decided yesterday to remove a Mises Institute video. This decision apparently lasts for all eternity, cannot be appealed to an actual human, and comes with this friendly admonition: “Because it’s the first time, this is just a warning. If it happens again, your channel will get a strike and you won’t be able to do things like upload, post, or live stream for 1 week.”
The video, a talk by Tom Woods titled “The Covid Cult” with more than 1.5 million views, was recorded at our live event in Texas two weeks ago. It offered challenges to the official narrative surrounding the coronavirus, particularly with respect to mask mandates. Woods’s talk featured several charts showing rises

[This is the transcript of the eponymous talk presented at the Mises Institute’s Ron Paul Symposium on November 7, 2020, in Angleton, Texas.] Hey, what a week for our sacred democracy. Wow! You know, it’s so sacred that just a few thousand votes in a few states here and there could have turned it from …

The goal of this national psychosis which they produce and impose on us every four years is demoralization, more than anything. Don’t let that happen. Presented at the Symposium with Ron Paul on Saturday, 7 November 2020, in Angleton, Texas.

Things don’t have to be this way. Original Article: “What Will It Take for Americans to Consider Breaking Up?”. This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack.

Why don’t elections bring harmony and closure rather than ever greater political friction? Hans-Hermann Hoppe explained all of the fundamental problems with mass democracy more than 20 years ago in Democracy: The God That Failed. Jeff Deist finishes his series on this devastating classic with a look at Hoppe’s final chapters, critiquing conservatism, liberalism, and …

In 2020, privilege manifests as political extortion. Push back against these bullies. This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Millian Quinteros. Original Article: “The Privilege of Politics”.

We have had nearly eight months of life and liberty stolen from us by politicians and their hysteria-promoting accomplices in media. How much more will we accept?This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. Narrated by Michael Stack. Original Article: “The Absurdity of Covid ‘Cases'”.

Presented at the historic Jekyll Island Club Resort on Jekyll Island, Georgia, on 9 October 2020.

Most of you know the great journalist Henry Hazlitt for his remarkable Economics in One Lesson. But in this episode, Jeff Deist discusses Hazlitt’s virtually unknown 1942 book A New Constitution Now, which is nothing short of a how-to guide for remaking the US constitutional system. Hazlitt was concerned about FDR’s third term and what …

Today’s headlines announced Donald and Melania Trump “tested positive” for covid-19. Another claims nineteen thousand Amazon workers “got” covid-19 on the job. Both of these pseudostories are sure to ignite another absurd media frenzy.  As always, the story keeps changing: Remember ventilators, flatten the curve, the next two weeks are crucial, etc.? Remember Nancy Pelosi in Chinatown …

In a very real sense Dr. Paul is the only Misesian ever to serve in Congress.  Narrated by the author. Original Article: “Ron Paul Remains Unstoppable​”.

When Dr. Ron Paul suffered a health scare during his live Liberty Report show last Friday, I was perhaps less worried than most of his friends, family, and fans. His remarkable vitality, vigor, and energy are well known to those around him, along with his penchant for exercise, clean living, and light eating. Having known him thirty years, I simply had no recollection of him ever being sick or out of commission. This is a man who had never missed a day of work or an event, at least in my memory. In my mind he was simply always there, a fixed feature of life. So my immediate reaction was to think he would be fine.
As it turns out, he is fine. Even unstoppable.
In Dr. Paul’s congressional office during the early 2000s, his