The Austrian School began as open inquiry into how people act, value and exchange.

It was never a political programme, and that is exactly why it kept being borrowed by those who needed one. In the Cold War it became a dumping ground for the neoconservatives: propaganda that needed a respectable address found one here, and the school carried it. Then the public-policy institutes discovered it and learned to sell legitimacy to interest groups, dressed in prizes that carry Alfred Nobel's name without his sanction. Where money and a good name collect, the grifters were never far behind.

The most recent bill came with the renewed politicisation around Javier Milei. Once more the school was flattened into free-market rhetoric, a supply of slogans for the campaign, with the analysis quietly left out. Rhetoric like that earns applause and pays for it in credibility, and by now a good deal has been spent.

The genuine achievement in this story lies elsewhere. For two decades the many Mises initiatives did something of real value: they put the texts of the Austrian School online and gave them away to anyone who cared to read. That motivation has since faded. We take the work up again with the tools now available: full digitisation, careful editing, and a search that actually links one thinker to the next.

mises.co is the English entry to the original Austrian School: the full corpus, freely readable, without the modern politics and without the fundraising that trades on its name. Free information, with no gatekeeper standing between you and the source, and no spin doctor to tell you what it means.

mises.co opens the same holdings as mises.at. An entry by way of the origins of the Austrian School:

From the library, now and then

A quiet newsletter on newly opened works, contributions and podcast conversations. Infrequent, never intrusive.