The Free Market 14, no. 9 (September 1996) Shannon Faulkner’s two-and-a-half year fight to become the first woman in The Citadel’s corps of cadets went out with an embarrassing whimper. She couldn’t handle the physical and psychological demands of Hell Week, landed in the infirmary, and dropped out. Case settled? Far from it. The Supreme Court
The Free Market 15, no. 12 (December 1997) After hundreds of years of attacks on Christmas, economists have finally gotten into the act. Yale University’s Joel Waldfogel, writing in the American Economic Review , condemns what he calls “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas.” Once you cut through the calculus and graphs, his conclusion is clear:
The Free Market 17, no. 9 (August 1999) No New York City public institution better illustrates the rise and decline of the city than the subways. The subways were primarily built by private-sector entrepreneurs at the turn of the century. On Oct. 27, 1904, the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT), the first subway line in the city, began operating
The Free Market 17, no. 11 (November 1999) Garet Garrett wrote in 1932, “Mass delusions are not rare. They salt the human story.” Indeed, mass delusions are no more apparent than in the realm of public policy and especially in the faith people have in their government to carry out functions designed to promote the public good. How else to
The Free Market 17, no. 12 (December 1999) Austrian economists should revel in the story of Ukara, a small, Tanzanian island in Lake Victoria. John Reader, in his astoundingly detailed and fascinating work, Africa: A Biography of the Continent (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), presents among a wealth of other information that should be of genuine
The Free Market 30, no. 2 (February 2012) To the minds of most environmentalists, the ham-hand of the government is needed to protect wildlife. Private property be damned— the government must step in, otherwise every species on the planet will be hunted into oblivion, or human development will gobble up all remaining wildlife habitat, leading to
The Free Market 24, no. 11 (November 2004) The newest political cliché offered up by the Republicans speaks of the need for an “Ownership Society.” To those of us who support private property, it might sound good at first. But let us think about this before embracing it. If you see what the pundits are saying, you find that, like the term
The Free Market 26, no. 10 (October 2005) The fifteenth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, signed into law by President Bush I on July 26, 1990, has come and gone, but it has not been a success. It has cost untold billions, increased the pestilence of labor disputes, and even increased the ranks of the unemployed among the
The Free Market 24, no. 1 (January 2006) The free market is a summary term for an array of exchanges that take place in society. Each exchange is undertaken as a voluntary agreement between two people or between groups of people represented by agents. These two individuals (or agents) exchange two economic goods, either tangible commodities or
The Free Market 20, no. 1 (January 2002) In the post-attack world, in which politicians attempt to impose the national security state at home and wage war abroad, a simple point has been obscured: it all started with a multiple hijacking. The theft of the planes was made possible not with grenades or heavy explosives but with box cutters—the
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.