Abstract: This chapter argues that democracy has both theoretical and practical implications that negatively affect the maintenance of language (and cultural) diversity. Attention is paid to the levelling effects of welfare policies, which tend to depress the speakers’ interest in language preservation and transmission and which typically negatively affect the quality of revitalisation programmes. The presentation discusses the practical and theoretical problems posed by possible ways out such as a voluntary, self-imposed “boundary maintenance” policy (Fishman 1991) and “the creation of linguistic fortresses or ghettoes” (Laponce 1984) in order to protect a minority language. Further, it argues that the democratic state – in itself just the last instalment of the nation-state – may have a special problem with multilingualism, and that language diversity possibly fared better in past forms of government.
Update: See Per Bylund’s taxonomy of types of information in Per L. Bylund, “Austrian Economics and Knowledge,” Q. J. Austrian Econ. 29, no. 2 (June 08, 2026): 1–24. Abstract:
This article develops a typology of knowledge in economics, drawing on the works of Carl Menger and F. A. Hayek, to clarify how different types of knowledge affect production, coordination, and entrepreneurial profit. It organizes economically relevant knowledge along two axes—the physical world versus the catallactic world, on the one hand, and general versus applied, on the other—and adds a temporal dimension to distinguish knowledge problems from uncertainty. The framework reveals that while physical-world knowledge sets the boundaries of what can be produced, catallactic-world knowledge guides what should be produced and how. The article applies this typology to Austrian theories of the market process, showing that uncertainty arises when value knowledge is unavailable at the time of action and that entrepreneurial profit stems from bearing this uncertainty rather than from superior knowledge. This conceptual separation advances the understanding of economic causality and the distinct functions of knowledge in market processes.
On Sept. 17–18, 2005, Professors Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Guido Hülsmann presented a two-day 11-lecture series, “Weekend Seminar in Austrian Economics,” in Klampenborg (just north of Copenhagen, Denmark), under the auspices of the Copenhagen Institute and Liberator. Program (local, and at right). See also Copenhagen Institute hosts Hoppe and Hülsmann, Mises Economics Blog (Sept. 1, 2005).
In 2009, the Mises Institute published Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a project Guido Hülsmann and and Stephan Kinsella spearheaded to honor Hans Hoppe on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Only a few of the pieces were published independently; we are posting them here in this Bookstream.
Lecture, “Rothbard’s Revolutionary Contract Theory,” “Liberté Tribute to Rothbard on his Centenary: Rothbard 100: A Legacy for Future Generations,” Sociedad de la Libertad Latam (SdL) (a Latin American think tank based in Lima, Peru) and the 5th American Youth for Liberty Forum (Aug. 12, 2026, International Youth Day; via Youtube). Attendees included young people with a background in libertarian thought from Bolivia, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico.
The speech was my English language talk interspersed with a Spanish translation by the moderator, Rosa María Apaza, Presidente SDL LATAM.
On Sept. 17–18, 2005, Professors Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Guido Hülsmann presented a two-day 11-lecture series, “Weekend Seminar in Austrian Economics,” in Klampenborg (just north of Copenhagen, Denmark), under the auspices of the Copenhagen Institute and Liberator. Program (local, and at right). See also Copenhagen Institute hosts Hoppe and Hülsmann, Mises Economics Blog (Sept. 1, 2005).
David Veksler, who recently revived the old Mises Wiki as The Austrian Economics Wiki, has used his growing mastery of AI and coding and passion for liberty to turn “a stale 2009–2014 torrent of public domain and Creative Commons libertarian works into a working library.” This is quite amazing. His Facebook post (Aug. 9. 2026) explains what is here:
I spent the last week turning a stale 2009–2014 torrent of public domain and Creative Commons libertarian works into a working library. Here’s what’s in it as of August 9, 2026:
219 new EPUBs, converted from PDF-only scans that never had an ebook edition. Every one passes a word-count QA check against the source PDF before it ships.
On Sept. 17–18, 2005, Professors Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Guido Hülsmann presented a two-day 11-lecture series, “Weekend Seminar in Austrian Economics,” in Klampenborg (just north of Copenhagen, Denmark), under the auspices of the Copenhagen Institute and Liberator. Program (local, and at right). See also Copenhagen Institute hosts Hoppe and Hülsmann, Mises Economics Blog (Sept. 1, 2005).
In 2009, the Mises Institute published Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a project Guido Hülsmann and and Stephan Kinsella spearheaded to honor Hans Hoppe on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Only a few of the pieces were published independently; we are posting them here in this Bookstream.
Arctotherium’s long essay argues that the “closure of the Internet” in the late 2010s was the most important social phenomenon of the period. Until roughly 2015, major platforms operated with minimal rules beyond real-world crimes (illegal goods, child exploitation, direct threats, etc.). This open environment was backed by institutions such as the UN, EU, U.S. State Department, and mainstream outlets that treated online speech as continuous with offline liberty and expected it to liberalize closed societies.
That changed rapidly in two phases:
2015–2019, linked to the migrant crisis, Brexit, Trump’s election, and the online right;
2020–2022, intensified by COVID policies and the 2020 U.S. election.
Platforms built large human and machine-learning moderation systems, invented or radically expanded concepts such as “disinformation,” “misinformation,” “malinformation,” “hate speech,” “toxicity,” and “online safety,” and applied them opaquely and selectively. Network analysis was used to map and suppress clusters of accounts; demonetization, shadowbans, algorithmic downranking, and outright bans became routine. The essay details the process platform by platform (YouTube’s post-2017 “adpocalypse” and policy expansions, Reddit’s successive subreddit purges and quarantine regime, Twitter’s evolving rules and later Twitter Files revelations of government/FBI coordination, Amazon’s book removals, etc.). Offline enforcement (firings, street violence, institutional purges) closed the remaining avenues. The result, in the author’s view, was a shift from a relatively open frontier to “closely monitored playpens,” with tens of millions of accounts affected and heterodox (especially anti-woke or right-leaning) discourse largely driven offline or into smaller, lower-capacity spaces. The piece frames this as a classic slippery-slope case with no stable limiting principle once the conceptual and technical apparatus existed.
I would argue that it was the May 2025 Revisionist History of War conference that I organized. Murray Rothbard believed that the two most important topics for libertarians and libertarianism are revisionist history and war. War is the health of the state. All states lie their countries in to wars, and then they and their “intellectual” shills lie about what happened during the wars, what caused them, and the consequences thereof. It’s hard to think of a more important Rothbardian research agenda than the revisionist history of war informed by Austrian economics and Rothbardian libertarian philosophy.
The speeches from the conference are online here. The most hard hitting ones were Ron Unz on the false history of World War II; Ilana Mercer on fake history of the Israeli state; a first-hand account of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty in which 34 American sailors were killed by Phil Tourney, president of the USS Liberty Veterans Association; Pentagon Lies by retired Air Force Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski; Scott Horton on how D.C. restarted the Cold War with Russia; truths about post-Civil War “reconstruction” by Wanjiru Njoya; the myth of the “righteous cause” from Lincoln to the war in Iraq by Brion McClanahan; and of course myself on the “false virtue” that has been used to “justify” American military imperialism for the past 150 years.
Longtime Mises Institute copy editor Judy Thomessen, who is now the top executive (executive director) of the Institute, has written to Hans that they do plan on publishing the book eventually. If so, it would be the most Rothbardian book published by the Mises Institute in thirty years (apart from Rothbard’s own posthumous publications).
On Sept. 17–18, 2005, Professors Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Guido Hülsmann presented a two-day 11-lecture series, “Weekend Seminar in Austrian Economics,” in Klampenborg (just north of Copenhagen, Denmark), under the auspices of the Copenhagen Institute and Liberator. Program (local, and at right). See also Copenhagen Institute hosts Hoppe and Hülsmann, Mises Economics Blog (Sept. 1, 2005).
Redmond David Terrence Weissenberger (July 4, 1975–March 12, 2025) (obituary) passed away last year. From Doug French:
Redmond Weissenberger was the founder of and energy behind Mises Canada, founded March 8, 2011 to spread the teachings of the Austrian School of Economics to Canada. While at the Mises Institute, I began the legal process to start a Mises Canada. I turned over what legal work had been done to Redmond given the lack of interest in the project at the Institute. He quickly carried Mises Canada across the finish line.
At the time, Mises Canada was one of the many Mises Institutes operating in over 20 countries. Its Board included Redmond, Chris Horlacher (Vice-Chairman and Treasurer), Doug French, and Walter Block. Eric Sprott (Sprott Asset Management and Sprott School of Business) was an important donor and supporter.
The mises.ca website has been static for years, but when active its articles were often reprinted on ZeroHedge.com. Mises Canada hosted Rothbard University in 2018 as well as the International Conference of Prices & Markets. David Howden served as editor of Mises Canada’s Prices & Markets, a peer-reviewed academic journal. Weissenberger also hatched the idea to offer Austrian-focused continuing education courses for real estate professionals which were offered at Freedomfest in Las Vegas.
Redmond passed away on March 12th, 2025 in Budapest, Hungary. I was notified just last week of Redmond’s death via an email from Chris Horlacher.
Redmond is survived by his children Finn and Piper Weissenberger, his siblings, Daniel Weissenberger and Janet Goodman, and his parents, Sheila Redmond and Ralph Calistro, Henry and Barbara Weissenberger.
Redmond also interviewed me a few times for his podcast.1 I liked him. Very smart, solid on IP, earnest advocate for liberty.
The Journal of Prices & Markets was published by the Mises Institute Canada from 2013 to 2019. It was spearheaded by the late Redmond Weissenberger1 and edited by PFS member David Howden. PFS co-founder Doug French served as associate editor and, as President of the Mises Institute US, assisted Weissenberger when he was setting up Mises Canada and the journal.
As Mises Canada as well as Mises Institute US archives may be unreliable, given Weissenberger’s death, the cessation of publication of the journal, and the Mises Institute’s digital and institutional decline,2 we are hosting copies of the volumes we could find here. No, I do not know why there are two Summer 2014 issues from different volumes. [continue reading…]
Bruce Goldberg, “Ayn Rand’s ‘For the New Intellectual,’” New Individualist Rev., vol. 1, no. 3 (Nov. 1961): 17–24 [omnibus edition pp. 97–104] (html1; html2). Repixeled in part below.
From Hoppe:
Among some followers of Austrianism, the Kant interpretation of Ayn Rand (see, for instance, her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology [1979]; or For the New Intellectual [1961]) enjoys great popularity. Her interpretation, replete with sweeping denunciatory pronouncements, however, is characterized by a complete absence of any interpretive documentation whatsoever. On Rand’s arrogant ignorance regarding Kant, see B. Goldberg, “Ayn Rand’s ‘For the New Intellectual,’” New Individualist Rev., vol. 1, no. 3 (1961).”1
On Sept. 17–18, 2005, Professors Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Guido Hülsmann presented a two-day 11-lecture series, “Weekend Seminar in Austrian Economics,” in Klampenborg (just north of Copenhagen, Denmark), under the auspices of the Copenhagen Institute and Liberator. Program (local, and at right). See also Copenhagen Institute hosts Hoppe and Hülsmann, Mises Economics Blog (Sept. 1, 2005).
In 2009, the Mises Institute published Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a project Guido Hülsmann and and Stephan Kinsella spearheaded to honor Hans Hoppe on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Only a few of the pieces were published independently; we are posting them here in this Bookstream.
New piece by Marco de Wit, “Mises Institute’s 5 Purges: Omitting Jewish Bankers— Five Private Steps in the Statist Censorship Continuum,” Unz Review (July 31, 2026) (Portuguese translation). In my view, it is far too much of a strained effort to connect-the-dots and forge a sweeping, overarching theory to explain a sequence of events, like conspiracy theorists are wont to do, but YMMV. But as I have noted previously, I’ve long had an aversion to conspiracy theorizing, and to what I call conspiratoids or ‘toids.
First, such theories are usually not needed; and they are usually maintained by people who have a naive view of the state. For them, if we can just get rid of the bad guys (and often they are bankers, capitalists, etc.) and elect good guys, things return to normal. 1
On Sept. 17–18, 2005, Professors Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Guido Hülsmann presented a two-day 11-lecture series, “Weekend Seminar in Austrian Economics,” in Klampenborg (just north of Copenhagen, Denmark), under the auspices of the Copenhagen Institute and Liberator. Program (local, and at right). See also Copenhagen Institute hosts Hoppe and Hülsmann, Mises Economics Blog (Sept. 1, 2005).
On Sept. 17–18, 2005, Professors Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Guido Hülsmann presented a two-day 11-lecture series, “Weekend Seminar in Austrian Economics,” in Klampenborg (just north of Copenhagen, Denmark), under the auspices of the Copenhagen Institute and Liberator. Program (local, and at right). See also Copenhagen Institute hosts Hoppe and Hülsmann, Mises Economics Blog (Sept. 1, 2005).
In 2009, the Mises Institute published Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a project Guido Hülsmann and and Stephan Kinsella spearheaded to honor Hans Hoppe on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Only a few of the pieces were published independently; we are posting them here in this Bookstream.
This article contends that Francoist Spain and Fascist Italy afforded citizens substantially greater economic freedom—gauged by tax structures and public spending as a share of GDP—than the democratic regimes that followed. Under Franco, Spain relied on older schedular product taxes and a limited turnover tax, with no modern progressive personal income tax or VAT; public spending stayed low at roughly 13–15% of GDP in 1960 and only about 22.5% in 1970. Italy under Fascism similarly featured a cascade-style general entry tax and real/product levies, keeping spending relatively contained outside wartime spikes. After the transitions, both countries introduced broad-based progressive income taxes (Spain’s IRPF in 1978 with 28 brackets up to 65.5%; Italy’s IRPEF in 1974 with 32 brackets up to 72%) and VAT (Spain 1986, Italy 1973, both starting at 12% and later rising to 21–22%). Public spending then expanded sharply—Spain to the mid-40s percent of GDP and Italy to around 50% or higher—while public debt soared, producing larger fiscal leviathans than under the prior dictatorships.
Both nations followed parallel paths of tax modernization under European pressure, followed by bracket simplification and sustained growth in the state’s claim on national output, with Italy consistently showing higher spending and debt ratios. The author attributes this expansion to the high time-preference of democratic politicians, who act as temporary usufructuaries rather than long-term owners of the state’s capital stock, drawing on Hoppe’s analysis in Democracy: The God That Failed and analogies to late-Roman fiscal overreach.
On Sept. 17–18, 2005, Professors Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Guido Hülsmann presented a two-day 11-lecture series, “Weekend Seminar in Austrian Economics,” in Klampenborg (just north of Copenhagen, Denmark), under the auspices of the Copenhagen Institute and Liberator. Program (local, and at right). See also Copenhagen Institute hosts Hoppe and Hülsmann, Mises Economics Blog (Sept. 1, 2005).
John AB Da Silva “Is taxation theft?, Observador (July 27, 2026): “Call it public service, sovereignty, or territorial continuity. The name is irrelevant. The bill never was.”
TAP religiously held strikes in August and at Christmas, precisely when the most people depended on it, earning it the international nickname “TAP: Take Another Plane”. Then came the partial privatization of 2015, the relief of no longer having to pay for an expensive and poor service, the renationalization in 2020, and the return to square one. Since one cannot be half-pregnant, here is TAP again, with the deadline for binding proposals from Air France-KLM and Lufthansa closing on July 29th, the third attempt to sell it since 2015. Behind this are the Airbus funds scandal, the compensation authorized via WhatsApp to a public manager, the compensation claimed by the former CEO, dismissed after the supervisory body announced her dismissal without even hearing her side of the story, and an endless number of other absurdities.
It was in this context that an unusual sign emerged. On June 27th, Porto hosted Rothbard 100, the largest libertarian gathering ever held in Portugal, to mark the centenary of Murray Rothbard. Among Hans Hermann Hoppe, Stephan Kinsella, and the other speakers, the phrase that most bothers those who live off the state budget was heard again: “taxation is theft,” said, with some irony, in a city with a historical tradition of the left. A month later, I no longer found it only on billboards. I saw it printed on t-shirts, from Lisbon to the beaches of Sagres. Something has changed in taxpayers’ tolerance for the waste of public money. It is not necessary to accept that all taxes are theft to recognize that a tax levied on everyone to finance the losses of a few is hardly distinguishable from a forced transfer of wealth. That is what TAP and, let’s be frank, also CP have been doing for decades: transferring the cost of companies that never asked taxpayers if they wanted to be shareholders to everyone.
Victor Niederhoffer (December 10, 1943–August 4, 2026) has passed away. From Bloomberg, via Doug French:
Victor Niederhoffer, the famed contrarian speculator who made fortunes as a quant pioneer while taking painful losses in the 1997 Thai stock market crash and the 2008 financial crisis, has died. He was 82.
Niederhoffer died on Tuesday of natural causes, according to his brother Roy.
A five-time US national squash champion who regularly challenged grandmasters in chess and checkers, Niederhoffer got his start applying statistical analysis to financial markets as an academic in the 1960s and 1970s, well before it became standard practice on Wall Street.
Niederhoffer well known in Objectivist and libertarian circles, having strong interest in both. According to Wikipedia, he was
the founder of the NYC Junto, a libertarian group that was hosted on the first Thursday of every month from 1985 to 2017. He was an enthusiast of Ayn Rand, and named two of his daughters Galt and Rand. The NYC Junto focused on libertarianism, Objectivism and investing and was inspired by the Junto hosted by Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia from 1727 to 1757. He had six daughters and one son.
As noted here, the 2026 Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Property and Freedom Society will be held from Thursday, September 17, 2026 to Tuesday, September 22, 2026.
Rothbard at 100 is in production! As you can see, the books are printed in premium hardcover with gold foil stamping, and then they will be covered with a dust jacket. Also available as an audiobook and eBook. Preorder your copy now: https://t.co/iaEh0bk5G0pic.twitter.com/bapPGmhFHb
To donate with BITCOIN please use the address below. If you would like us to credit your payment (for dues, conference fees, etc.) please email Stephan Kinsella ([email protected]) when you make the bitcoin payment.
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“Property does not exist because there are laws, but laws exist because there is property.” — FrédéricBastiat
“Because the concept of property, for instance, is so basic that everyone seems to have some immediate understanding of it, most people never think about it carefully and can, as a consequence, produce at best a very vague definition. But starting from imprecisely stated or assumed definitions and building a complex network of thought upon them can lead only to intellectual disaster. For the original imprecisions and loopholes will then pervade and distort everything derived from them. To avoid this, the concept of property must first be clarified.” —Hans-Hermann Hoppe, TSC, ch. 2
The Property and Freedom Society (PFS; Facebook) stands for an uncompromising intellectual radicalism: for justly acquired private property, freedom of contract, freedom of association—which logically implies the right to not associate with, or to discriminate against—anyone in one's personal and business relations—and unconditional free trade. It condemns imperialism and militarism and their fomenters, and champions peace. It rejects positivism, relativism, and egalitarianism in any form, whether of "outcome" or "opportunity," and it has an outspoken distaste for politics and politicians. As such it seeks to avoid any association with the policies and proponents of interventionism, which Ludwig von Mises identified in 1946 as the fatal flaw in the plan of the many earlier and contemporary attempts by intellectuals alarmed by the rising tide of socialism and totalitarianism to found an anti-socialist ideological movement. Mises wrote: "What these frightened intellectuals did not comprehend was that all those measures of government interference with business which they advocated are abortive. ... There is no middle way. Either the consumers are supreme or the government."
(A more complete statement of our Principles can be found here.)
Mauro Tosco, “Democracy: a threat to language diversity?,” in Contested Languages: The hidden multilingualism of Europe, Marco Tamburelli and Mauro Tosco, eds. (John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2021; alt).
219 new EPUBs, converted from PDF-only scans that never had an ebook edition. Every one passes a word-count QA check against the source PDF before it ships.
Alessandro Fusillo
Andreas Tögel
David Dürr
Doug French
Fernando Chiocca
Greg Morin
Hans-Hermann Hoppe
Jay Baykal
Jayant Bhandari
Jeff Deist
Jeffrey Barr
Juan Fernando Carpio
Ken Yamarashi
León Isidoro
Martin Cabrera
Oscar Grau
Peter Wong
PFS
Saifedean Ammous
Sean Gabb
Sean Ring
Stephan Kinsella
Stéphane Geyres
Thomas Jacob
Tom DiLorenzo
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