The Free Market 18, no. 1 (January 2000) A strong economy is the mortal enemy of the welfare bureaucracy. If Americans are productive and prospering, who needs all those welfare bureaucrats? So, to eliminate the threat of diminished funding of its pay, privileges, and perks, the Washington welfare bureaucracy, led by President Clinton, is
The Free Market 18, no. 2 (February 2000) At the end of the century, Bill Clinton declared Franklin D. Roosevelt the “man of the century” for having “saved capitalism,” echoing the gushing praise that Newt Gingrich has heaped on FDR, calling him “the greatest figure of the twentieth century.” The greatest phony of the twentieth century would be
The Free Market 18, no. 3 (March 2000) Legal scholar Gene Healy has made a powerful argument in favor of abolishing the Fourteenth Amend ment to the US Constitution. When a fair vote was taken on it in 1865, in the aftermath of the War for Southern Independence, it was rejected by the Southern states and all the border states. Failing to secure
The Free Market 18, no. 5 (May 2000) Like a man who douses a large pile of rags with gasoline and then warns of a fire hazard, Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan has begun issuing dire warnings of impending inflation after orchestrating several years of explosive monetary growth. To some observers this behavior is just the result of the difficulties
The Free Market 24, no. 10 (October 2004) In Human Action , Ludwig von Mises wrote that labor unions have always been the primary source of anticapitalistic propaganda. I was reminded of this recently when I saw a bumper sticker proclaiming one of the bedrock tenets of unionism: “The Union Movement: The People Who Brought You the Weekend.”
The Free Market 24, no. 11 (November 2004) M acroeconomic model builders have finally realized what Henry Hazlitt and John T. Flynn (among others) knew in the 1930s: FDR’s New Deal made the Great Depression longer and deeper. It is a myth that Franklin D. Roosevelt “got us out of the Depression” and “saved capitalism from itself,” as
The Free Market 24, no. 12 (December 2004) T wo years ago I was on a faculty committee to choose the one book that incoming freshmen would be asked to read and discuss in discussion groups during freshman orientation. It was the School of Business’s turn to choose the book, so I thought it would be valuable, for once, for the freshmen to read a
The Free Market 26, no. 6 (June 2005) I n his newly-released federal budget, President George W. Bush promises to reduce farm subsidies. Predictably, on the day the budget was made public there were well-choreographed “protests” by all the usual suspects, mostly millionaire corporate farmers camped out at the Mayflower or Four Seasons hotels in
The Free Market 26, no. 12 (December 2005) Supply and demand have been allowed to work—at least in a limited way—in energy markets, resulting in ups and downs in gasoline prices. Strong demand coupled with regulatory supply restrictions that were worsened by several hurricanes caused gasoline prices to go up. Then as hurricane-damaged refineries
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
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.