December 22, 2024

Please help us in our fight to save freedom in America—and indeed the rest of the world—by making as generous a donation as you can.

I became a student of Austrian economics and libertarian philosophy by accident. In my first semester in college in 1972, I signed up for Principles of Microeconomics. In the classroom was a bookshelf that happened to have all the back issues of The Freeman published by the Foundation for Economic Education. I started reading some of the articles—by Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Henry Hazlitt, Gary North, Israel Kirzner, William Hutt, and other free-market writers—and I was hooked! I decided then that I wanted to be like these brave, highly educated, and articulate men who were so devoted to the cause of a free society.

Those were the old days before there was a Mises Institute. The Austrian School was all but forgotten by the academic world, and the best-selling economics textbook, by Paul Samuelson, was forecasting that Soviet socialism would eventually create more prosperity than American capitalism. How things have changed! Today, thanks to forty-one years of hard work by Lew and the faculty and staff of the Institute, there is an army of academics all around the world who educate their students about the Austrian School, send them to Mises University in the summers, and induce them to become avid readers of all the literature of mises.org—the best economics and liberty website in the world. These students are the newest remnant, and they will become part of an even larger army of freedom in the future.

The Mises Institute is essentially an ammunition factory in service of the intellectual war for freedom. It is these young people who will be battling their “woke” totalitarian peers in defense of freedom and against whatever new version of socialist totalitarianism emerges in the decades to come. Please help us ensure that they will be as heavily armed as possible with the ideas of freedom and Austrian economics by making a generous contribution to the Mises Institute this holiday season. Thank you again for your heroic and generous support of everything we do.

Best wishes for a prosperous New Year. 

Please donate today and receive Joe Salerno’s The Progressive Road to Socialism.