The Free Market 14, no. 4 (April 1996) Should free enterprise stop at the border? Of course not, and the attempt to make it so can drive us to ruin. Yet politicians are hammering free trade. Long-refuted myths are back in full force, and the voters are getting a miseducation in the economics of autarky. The politicians criticizing free trade are
The Free Market 14, no. 4 (April 1996) Leftist critics of capitalism like Labor Secretary Robert Reich have criticized the alleged shortsightedness of American corporations, while praising the supposedly longer-range perspectives of their Japanese competitors. Well, the Nissan Motor Corporation just proved that it can be every bit as
The Free Market 15, no. 4 (April 1997) The Washington Times asked the new UN head why he thinks the agency has a PR problem in the United States. “It is a leftover from the late seventies and eighties,” he said, “when there was a lot of talking about getting government off the back of people.” Right, but it’s more of a living reality than a
The Free Market 15, no. 8 (August 1997) Our domestic automakers produce fine cars and trucks that people freely choose to buy. They make lots of money doing this. So why is the federal government shoveling hundred of millions of dollars annually in corporate welfare their way? Uncle Sam says it’s all in a good cause, funding research to build an
The Free Market 18, no. 1 (January 2000) From the 1930s through the 1980s , government claimed it could innovate better than private markets. That’s what the boondoggles like TVA, Nasa , and Semitech were all about. Hardly anyone believes that anymore, so the rationale for government regulation of technology has changed. It now concerns such
The Free Market 23, no. ( 2003) A growing recognition of the superiority of markets over planning has created an unviable hybrid: the planned market, one created not by property owners by the state and for the state. Planned markets bear close enough resemblance to the real thing as to fool even astute observers who are otherwise friends of
The Free Market 24, no. 7 (July 2004) T he psychology of the anti-market left can be a puzzle, but even more confounding is the mentality of the anti-market right. There are agrarians, medievalists, and nationalists, and, above all, the neoconservatives, who dread the market as much as any socialist from days of yore. Their critique differs, but
The Free Market 19, no. 12 (December 2001) In the weeks following the terror attacks, calls have come from politicians and journalists to “federalize” airport security by making workers who screen passengers and baggage government employees. House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt and others in Congress have declared that “passengers won’t feel
The Free Market 20, no. 2 (February 2002) Consumer protection regulation is the consumer’s worst nightmare. In fact, it is not protective at all. It is merely another one of those regulatory rackets that has the appearance of providing necessary security for a collective group in an entirely positive sense while encompassing no negatives. After
The Free Market 20, no. 10 (October 2002) What a sight: the legislative and executive branches of government celebrating as they impose new criminal codes against corporate fraud, each politician trying to outdo the other in their moral outrage against business. These are people who created and guard what is perhaps the greatest financial fraud
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.