David Gordon
Mises Institute
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Past articles by David:
Democracy without Foundations
In last week’s column, I criticized Jedediah Purdy for the ignorance of economic theory on display in his Two Cheers for Politics. Fortunately, the book contains much of interest, reflecting the author’s wide knowledge of the history of political philosophy. → Read More
The New Deal: Admissions against Interest
It would be easy to write a very negative review of Robert Kuttner’s Going Big (New Press, 2022), but it would be a mistake to do. Kuttner is a well-known progressive economist and the founder of the Economic Policy Institute. → Read More
Hazony on the American Tradition
In last week’s article, I discussed some of the arguments Yoram Hazony gives in his book Conservatism: A Rediscovery in favor of an empiricist procedure in ethics that supports working within a particular national tradition and against the rationalist deductive method of those who without empirical → Read More
Mises and Fascism
“Fascist” these days is little more than a term of abuse for opponents and has no cognitive value, but in what follows I’ll be using it in a precise sense, to designate a supporter of the regime established by Benito Mussolini in Italy. → Read More
What You Always Wanted to Know about Alfred Schutz
Both Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard thought highly of Alfred Schutz, an Austrian philosopher and sociologist who studied with Mises in Vienna and worked as both an academic and an investment banker in Austria and later in the United States. → Read More
Mises, Kant, and Worker Exploitation
Most of my readers are likely to think that socialism is morally wrong in that it violates people’s rights; but in this week’s article, I’d like to discuss an argument by one philosopher who thinks just the contrary, that morality requires socialism, as well as Ludwig von Mises’s refutation of this → Read More
Murray Rothbard's Birthday
Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s 96th birthday. He was an unforgettable friend, whose immense knowledge of many different fields was unsurpassed in my experience. In a lecture on the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle, he mentioned the common objection that the expansion of bank credit might have no effect, if investors anticipated trouble. After the lecture, I asked → Read More
Gary North (1942-2022) R.I.P.
I am sorry to have to report the death of another old friend, Gary North, who passed away a few days after his eightieth birthday. He was by training an economic historian and had a strong commitment to Austrian economics. He greatly admired Mises and Rothbard. He once asked Mises how he had been able to publish his famous article of 1920 on socialist calculation in a journal → Read More
Paul Cantor (1945-2022) R.I.P.
It was a shock to learn last night that my dear friend Paul Cantor had passed away. He was a great Shakespeare scholar and in Shakespeare’s Rome and Shakespeare’s Roman Trilogy he showed that Shakespeare had a profound knowledge of the reasons for the rise and fall of the Roman Republic. In the latter book, he compared Shakespeare’s interpretation of Christianity to → Read More
Socialist Planning and War
Last week I wrote about Ludwig von Mises’s important letter to the New York Times in June 1942 about the Nazi economy. In the letter, Mises says that foreign trade poses a difficult problem for a socialist economy. → Read More
A New Defense of the Single Tax
Libertarians stress self-ownership and property rights, but one variant position, held by Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov, limits property rights. → Read More
Equality and Envy
Critics of egalitarianism, meaning by that equality, or close to it, of income and wealth among the members of a society, often claim that it rests on envy. In response, defenders say that there are respectable reasons to favor equality. → Read More
The Befuddling World of the Antieconomist
Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2020By Thomas PikettyYale University Press, 2021352 pages Thomas Piketty has written a useful book. → Read More
Can Taxation Be Justified
The philosopher Michael Huemer is usually favorable to the free market, and he is also a strong defender of anarchism. Although I disagree with some of the arguments in his defense of anarchism, The Problem of Political Authority, it is an excellent book. → Read More
Political Economy and Political Philosophy Share a Source: Scarcity
Hans Hoppe’s famous “argumentation ethics” has generated a great deal of attention among libertarians, and deservedly so. Has Hoppe produced an ironclad demonstration that people have libertarian rights? I don’t propose to contribute to that discussion on this occasion. → Read More
Capitalism Isn't a Modern Invention. It's Medieval.
During the eighteenth century, capitalism in Europe “took off” in a way it had not done before, and as a result the West surpassed all other areas of the world in economic growth. What led to this transformation? Max Weber offers the most famous answer. → Read More
Toshio Murata, R.I.P.
Professor Toshio Murata of the Yokohama College of Commerce died on March 12, 2021, at the venerable age of 97. During World War II, he was a staff officer responsible for economic planning in Shanghai, under the Japanese Occupation. He soon found out that central planning in a city of that size did not work, and, when his opinions become known to the central authorities, he → Read More
Happy Birthday, Murray!
Today would have been Murray Rothbard’s ninety-fifth birthday. He was an unforgettable friend whose immense knowledge of many different fields was unsurpassed in my experience. In a lecture on the Austrian theory of the business cycle, he mentioned the common objection that the expansion of bank credit might have no effect if investors anticipated trouble. After the lecture, I → Read More
Jeff Riggenbach, R.I.P.
Jeff Riggenbach, one of the pioneer libertarians from the 1970s, died today at the age of 74. → Read More
America at the Point of No Return
The States: America at the Point of No Returnby Michael AntonRegnery Publishing, 2020441 pages Michael Anton is best known to the public through his essay “The Flight 93 Election,” published in 2016 under a pseudonym in the Claremont Review of Books. → Read More