Here is another outrageous story of how far taxing bureaucrats will go to enforce taxes: A woman was stunned and embarrassed when police arrested her Feb. 19 in front of her children. Her alleged offense: failure to appear in court on a charge of failure to file a 2001 city income tax form. She says she owed the city only 96
Walter Block’s recent thread “I blew my chance to be on the payroll with everyone else!” reminded me of a scene out of the recent Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. The context of the scene is as follows. The wizarding world is in a state of unrest as the evil wizard Lord Voldemort has returned and begun a subversive movement of Death Eaters
A federal trial over a Pennsylvania school that required bringing up the question of “intelligent design” (are there aspects of life not explained by evolution, which might best be explained by the existence of an intelligent “designer”?) has brought the issue to America’s front pages. The core of the argument against intelligent design is that it
In their recently published paper, “The Curley Effect: The Economics of Shaping the Electorate” (Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Vol. 21(1), April 2005, pp. 1-19), Harvard economists Glaeser and Shleifer argue that democratic leaders can mix incendiary rhetoric and the redistributive powers of the state to encourage political
The fallout from the French vote of “no” on the EU constitution includes a sign that Tony Blair may scrap plans to hold a similar referendum--which effectively kills, for now, the whole effort to create an overarching government charter. The spin, which often has little to do with reality, is where it gets interesting. Did it represent a blow to
I recently heard from Jason McBride, who was the subject of my last Mises.org article, “The Right to Set Your Own Price” . McBride, a gas station owner from Aliceville, Alabama, was arrested for violating Alabama’s “anti-gouging” law on the day that Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast. Jason told me that there was more to the story than
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.