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. 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 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 18, no. 2 (February 2000) It was 1934, and government- caused mass unemployment supposedly was being solved by a near mass takeover of the economy by that same government. However, “Do you have a job?” was not the only important question that Uncle Sam had for his subjects. He also wanted to know, “Are You Training Your Child To
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 18, no. 5 (May 2000) E.O. Wilson of Harvard University is among the world’s most esteemed biologists. An authority on ants, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes and coined the term “sociobiology,” outraging his peers by suggesting that human behavior has some relation to human nature. Sadly, these triumphs seem to have inspired him to
The Free Market 18, no. 5 (May 2000) When one thinks of “death by government,” either those killed by armed members of the state or the millions who have perished in the vast gulags and prisons run by governmental agents usually come to mind. However, government has demonstrated far more creativity in eliminating people than just by shooting or
The Free Market 18, no. 5 (May 2000) Watching Joel Klein of the Antitrust Division on television, speaking about the dangers that Microsoft poses to the public, calls to mind a passage from Martin van Creveld’s The Rise and Decline of the State: “Born in sin, the bastard offspring of declining autocracy and bureaucracy run amok, the state is a
The Free Market 18, no. 9 (September 2000) Mt. Rushmore is famous because 60 years ago, someone carved the faces of four dead presidents into its lofty Harney Peak granite cliffs. The mountain itself is located in the Black Hills, a somewhat obscure mountain range in western South Dakota and eastern Wyoming that resembles the Southern
The Free Market 18, no. 10 (October 2000) Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal is excited. The leftist columnist believes that he has found a wonderful “Third Way” example of using government to help poor people without the whole thing becoming yet another socialist giveaway. However, as with most government schemes that Hunt and his statist media
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.