President’s Impact Report — Fourth Quarter 2019

Faculty, Associated Scholars, and More

• Mises Institute Senior Fellow Hans-Hermann Hoppe received the Roland Baader Award at the Palais Coburg in Vienna, Austria, at an even commenorating the 70th anniversary of the publication of Mises’s Human Action.
• Patrick Newman received the George F. Koether Free-Market Writing Award for his work editing Conceived in Liberty, Volume V.
• Dr. Sandra Klein (Baylor University) and Dr. Lukasz Dominiak (Nicolaus Copernicus University) were named Mises Institute Fellows. 
• Butler Shaffer, a Mises Institute Associated Scholar and prolific libertarian theorist, passed away in December. Lew Rockwell authored a remembrance here.

2019 Mises Institute Supporters Summit:

75 years ago, in October 1944, Ludwig von Mises addressed a select group of business leaders at The California Club in Los Angeles. In 2019, we returned to the same historic venue to celebrate him and his important work with friends from all around the world for this year’s Supporters Summit. Featuring talks by Jeff Deist, Lew Rockwell, Tom Woods, Peter Klein, Michael Bolden, and Patrick Newman this event was not simply a great celebration of Mises the man, but the continuing legacy and importance of his work. Audio is available here.

Other Events:

• “Why American Democracy Fails” was the topic of our event this September in Bellevue, Washington. Featuring Jeff Deist, Bob Murphy, and Illana Mercer, the event placed the spotlight on the myth of democratic consensus, and what it means for the upcoming 2020 presidential election. Special thanks to the Harvey Allison family for making this event possible.
• The Journal of Libertarian Studies was restarted after a ten-year hiatus in publication, with David Gordon at the helm as editor.
• The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics added three associate editors to assist with the refereeing process. Jeffrey Herbener was already an associate editor, and he was joined by Per Bylund, David Howden, and Matt McCaffrey.
• Mises Institute Fellow Per Bylund was featured as a Guest Editor of the Mises Journal for a Special Issue on Entrepreneurship. The Mises Journal is a publication of Mises Institute Brasil.

Mises Audio:

• As part of a larger project digitizing recently donated audiotapes of past events, the Mises Institute published recordings of the “First Annual Advanced Instructional Conference in Austrian Economics” at Stanford University. This conference would become Mises University. The audio includes lectures from Murray Rothbard, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Roger Garrison, Walter Block, and Charles W. Baird.
• Other audio released from this collection also included audio from Mises University 1990, “The Federal Reserve: History, Theory, and Practice,” an event hosted at Jekyll Island in 1986, and the complete set of lectures by Murray Rothbard in a series titled “Austrian Economics: An Introductory Course.”

Top 5 Podcast Episodes of the Quarter are:

1. Patrick Newman on Rothbard and his Critics  21,444
2. Why Gold Still Matters 19,589
3. The Cultural Consequences of Negative Interest Rates  10,470
4. Does Economic Theory Work in Business? 8,955
5. Understanding Money Mechanics 7,582

Media Recognition

• Mark Thornton’s work on prohibition was featured in a BBC Series 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy
• Patrick Newman’s Op-Ed “Many Reasons to Wield a Trust Buster Sword” was published in the Wall Street Journal
• Walter Block’s Op-Ed “Bad Capitalism and Good Socialism” was published in the Wall Street Journal
• Arkadiusz Sieroń’s article “Gold During Global Monetary Ease” was published by Yahoo Finance!
• Ryan McMaken was quoted in MarketWatch, Global Market Research, Voice of America, Duke Chronicle, The American Conservative, and other outlets.
• Jeff Deist was quoted in The Epoch Times and appeared on the Ron Paul Liberty Report.
• The work of the Mises Institute was mentioned in the Forbes article “The Collegiate Conservative Counter-Revolution.”
• Our Supporters Summit in Los Angeles was covered by The Epoch Times.
• Numerous Mises Wire articles were republished in high volume sites including ZeroHedge, Seeking Alpha, and Eurasia Review.

Publications and Bookstore

• The Mises Institute published Conceived in Liberty, Volume V by Murray Rothbard, edited by Patrick Newman.
• “History of Austro-Libertarian Thought,” a comprehensive desktop reference and chart, was published thanks to the generosity of John Laing. Research for the project was conducted by David Gordon and Lukasz Dominiak.
• Mises for Business published our first ebook Understanding the Mind of the Consumer.
• Mises for Business also published the first in a series of explainer videos.
• The minibook Marxism and the Manipulation of Man was published.
• The Mises Institute Bookstore released new products, including a fleece vest and hooded sweatshirt.

Mises.org

Top Ten New Articles of the Quarter:

1. The Bogus “Consensus” Argument on Climate Change by Bob Murphy
2. How to Avoid Civil War: Decentralization, Nullification, Secession by Ryan McMaken
3. Medicare and Medicaid Destroyed Healthcare by Jacob Hornberger
4. The Problem with Elizabeth Warren’s Wealth-Tax Plan by Germinal G. Van
5. The Repo Crisis Shows the Damage Done by Central Bank Policies by Daniel Lacalle
6. What We Can Learn from Indian Tribes on Immigration by Ryan McMaken
7. The Wealth Redistribution Scam that Is “Inflation” by Thorsten Polleit
8. The Late Great State of California by Jeffrey Harding
9. The Deep State: The Headless Fourth Branch of Government by Ryan McMaken
10. It’s Trump vs. the Deep State vs. the Rest of Us by Ryan McMaken

Top 3 PDF Book Downloads of the Quarter:

1. Human Action, 80,004 downloads
2. Introduction to Economics, 18,742 downloads
3. The Theory of Money and Credit, 9,666 downloads

Mises Institute International:

• The first German edition of Human Action has been published thanks to our friends at Viennese Scholarium and Mises Institute Austria.
• Translations of Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed were published in French and Arabic.

Mises Wire

The Mises Institute exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian school of economics, and individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. These great thinkers developed praxeology, a deductive science of human action based on premises known with certainty to be true, and this is what we teach and advocate. Our scholarly work is founded in Misesian praxeology, and in self-conscious opposition to the mathematical modeling and hypothesis-testing that has created so much confusion in neoclassical economics. Visit https://mises.org