The Free Market 17, no. 7 (July 1999) The international socialist movement, led by Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, is attempting to revive the disastrous policy of war socialism with which the current century began. Four recent events make clear their intentions: the Nato war on
The Free Market 17, no. 10 (October 1999) Although it went unobserved in media accounts, there was something for everyone in Mrs. Albright’s splendid little war: the left can toast their humanitarianism, right-militarists can justify more “defense” spending, Nato has a new lease on life, the Serbs were rid of the Kosovars, and 10,000 ethnic
The Free Market 26, no. 1 (January 2008) Margaret Atwood’s poem “Siren Song” begins: This is the one song everyone would like to learn: the song that is irresistible: the song that forces men to leap overboard in squadrons even though they see the beached skulls. Our rulers know how to sing that song, and they sing it day and night. The
The Free Market 21, no. 1 (January 2003) Many of the same people who debunked Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, and ridiculed its failures, are enthusiastically backing George W. Bush’s War on Terror. Both are big-government programs. Why back one and not the other? Left-liberals say that the job of the state is to bring about fairness and
The Free Market 21, no. 6 (June 2003) “The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different from the one we had war-gamed against,” said General William Wallace after the first week of fighting in Iraq had not gone as planned. The comment speaks to a truth of which we are reminded in wartime: the military is a government operation that undertakes its
The Free Market 23, no. 7 (July 2003) The extent to which we are secure in our homes, property, and the places we shop is due in large part to the commercial marketplace. It is the free market that makes available alarm systems, locks, fences, cameras, security services, and in purchasing these items we are free to make a choice among
The Free Market 23, no. 11 (November 2003) When they have the resources and political support, would-be central planners like to take their show on the road, always with the same results: huge promises followed by big disasters. Thus is there no reason to be shocked or surprised at the enormous mess the US has created in Iraq. With bombings,
The Free Market 26, no. 8 (August 2005) A law of democratic government is that any group that gains power becomes part of the problem, not the solution. Republicans are the classic case. They are elected to cut government and then race each other to outdo their opponents in expanding it, while all promises to the contrary are forgotten or
The Free Market 18, no. 10 (October 2000) Both Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek were called upon during wartime to weigh in on the question: what is the best economic policy in the conduct of war? Both were opposed to using war as a device for socializing the economy. If a war must be waged, they argued in their roles as value-free economists,
The Free Market 18, no. 12 (December 2000) One of the pillars of an interventionist US foreign policy is foreign aid. Since World War II, the United States has dispensed billions of dollars in foreign aid to virtually every country on the planet. Foreign aid was lavished on our friends and our foes during the cold war and a decade after. It is
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.