The Free Market 18, no. 1 (January 2000) Jean-Claude Castex is surrounded by miracles, or at least the quest for miracles. As the official feutier, or tender of religious candles, at Lourdes, the spot in France where the Virgin Mary appeared in a grotto to a poor miller’s daughter in the nineteenth century, Castex sees, on average, some 14,000
The Free Market 26, no. 9 (September 2005) T hose of us who appreciate liberty, voluntary exchange, and workers’ property rights to their own labor have long objected to the American organized labor movement. Since the 1930s , this movement has been defined by the AFL-CIO. This “mother of all unions” is the biggest, with a membership of just
The Free Market 24, no. 2 (February 2006) Most of the commentary on the ongoing propaganda campaign against Wal- Mart ignores what is probably the most important aspect of it: It is primarily a labor-union-inspired campaign against Wal-Mart employees, as well as the company in general. This is the essential truth of all union organizing
The Free Market 24, no. 5 (May 2006) The question that no one seems to be asking is: where would General Motors be without the government-backed unions that have come to dominate its management? The answer, of course, applies to Ford and Chrysler, as well as to General Motors. I’ve singled out General Motors because it’s still the largest of the
The Free Market 26, no. 9 (September 2006) For lack of a better term I am dubbing it Woods’s Law: whenever the private sector introduces an innovation that makes the poor better off than they would have been without it, or that offers benefits or terms that no one else is prepared to offer them, someone—in the name of helping the poor—will call
The Free Market 24, no. 10 (November 2006) Entrepreneurs are in a danger zone when their activities are incomprehensible to the general public. People begin to regard unexplained profits as suspicious, and the entrepreneur encounters public hostility. Entrepreneurs who assemble physical objects may find their activities transparent enough to
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.