Tag Archives: Ludwig von Mises Institute

YouTube Attempts to Silence the Mises Institute, by Jeff Deist

Mises questions the Covid-19 orthodoxy and gets the boot from YouTube. From Jeff Deist at mises.org:

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 in Covid “cases” across multiple cities and countries not long after imposing mask rules, demonstrating how such rules apparently have little effect on slowing transmission of the virus.

YouTube

The speech was nothing less than a heartfelt tour de force against the terrible lockdowns and pseudoscience plaguing the debate over Covid, and a call to reexamine tradeoffs and priorities. It was, as you might imagine, a mix of unassailable data combined with our friend Tom’s strong prescription for liberty and personal choice rather than centralized state edicts.

Continue reading→

A Capitalist Christmas, by Dale Steinreich

From the Ludwig von Mises Institute, via The Free Market magazine, December 1995:

Halloween has a socialist tenor. Menacing figures arrive at your door uninvited, demand your property, and threaten to perform an unspecified “trick” if you don’t fork over. That’s the way the government works in a nutshell.

Thanksgiving has been reinterpreted as the white man, after burning, raping, and pillaging the noble Indian, trying to make amends with a cheap turkey dinner. New Year’s can be ruined as the beginning of a new tax year, and the knowledge that the next five or six months will be spent working for the government.

That’s why I love Christmas. To this day it remains a celebration of liberty and private life, as well as a much-needed break from the incessant politicization of modern life. It’s the most pro-capitalist of all holidays because its temporal joys are based on private property, voluntary exchange, and mutual benefit.

In Christmas shopping, we find persistent reminders of charity programs that work and little sign of those (welfare bureaucracies) that don’t. The Salvation Army, Goodwill dispensers in parking lots, and boxes filled with canned goods and toys are all elements of true charity. This giving is based on volition rather than coercion, which is the key to its success.

To continue reading: http://mises.org/library/capitalist-christmas-0