The Free Market 13, no. 12 (December 1995) Cheers to the governors of Alabama and Virginia for sending back millions of dollars earmarked for the “Goals 2000” program slated to be imposed on their states’ schools. After decades of federal attacks on local control, they have responded to voter demands that school centralization be halted. Today,
The Free Market 13, no. 12 (December 1995) Washington agencies pay private-sector clipping services so senior management can know who their friends and enemies are. Journalists who write negatively about, say, the BATF, immediately enter the agency’s sights. Even if nothing is done with the information, the knowledge that it’s being collected
The Free Market 14, no. 3 (March 1996) The joy erupting in Howard University’s student union was palpably motivated; O.J. Simpson would walk. “As the verdict was read, the place erupted into screaming and jumping. You couldn’t hear,” one observer put it. To the students, a falsely accused black man was able to get justice—in racist America, no
The Free Market 14, no. 6 (June 1996) Government bureaucrats look out for their own kind. Entrepreneur John Shanahan, the man behind “Hooked on Phonics,” found that out the hard way when he developed a program that taught his son how to read after the California public schools could not. Literacy rates in the United States have plunged since
The Free Market 14, no. 9 (September 1996) In a state-funded education system, bad ideas live longer than they would in a free market. That’s the best explanation for the staying power of the two opposing errors of our time: nihilism and pseudo-omniscience in the social sciences. Nihilism comes in the form of postmodernism, a pretentious body of
The Free Market 14, no. 9 (September 1996) Now in its seventh year, the school voucher experiment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is held up as a model for the nation. But the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has found itself fighting its own track record as much as the city’s public school establishment. The early cascade of hurrahs has slowed in
The Free Market 14, no. 11 (November 1996) In the famed 1995 budget battles between the White House and the Congress, Bill Clinton told a whopper that put him on the rhetorical offensive. He said that Congress’s proposed cuts in a particular program amounted to “raising taxes on the poor.” It was classic Clinton: he could oppose a bill that
The Free Market 15, no. 1 (January 1997) People who advocate tax-funded school vouchers for private schools frequently hail the G.I. Bill of Rights education vouchers for World War II veterans as a model. In truth, the G.I. Bill was a budget-busting middle-class entitlement scheme that had destructive effects on higher education, and set the stage
The Free Market 15, no. 4 (April 1997) President Clinton, standing tall among Miami schoolchildren and pushing the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, calls on America’s youth to stand for values. So does the U.S. Department of Education in its master plan, Goals 2000 . As do Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, the Rainbow Curriculum in
The Free Market 15, no. 8 (August 1997) An hour before midnight, February 3, 1997, a sheriff’s car with its lights flashing pulled up to a middle-class home in Effingham County, Georgia. It had come for Debbie Gaskin, wife and mother. She was arrested, handcuffed, fingerprinted, and photographed. She posted bond, and was released. What crime had
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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.