The Free Market 13, no. 12 (December 1995) Recycling has a high moral status, mostly because kids come home with bad information from schools and, in turn, use it to intimidate their parents. One poll revealed that 63% of kids have told Mom or Dad to recycle. Parents, be ashamed no more! Throw that trash away. There’s no virtue in recycling
The Free Market 14, no. 2 (February 1996) The pattern is all-too-familiar: Congress and its bureaus of executive-branch henchmen arrogantly mock the Constitution, only to be applauded by the courts. Nowhere is this pattern more evident than the recent case of Leslie Salt Co. vs. the United States . Here are the facts. For decades, a 153-acre
The Free Market 14, no. 5 (May 1996) The 1996 blizzard dumped three feet of snow on the Washington, D.C., area. The event proved once again that statist economists, armed with their “market failure” theories, perceive reality exactly the opposite from the way it is. It is government, not the free market, that is inherently plagued with
The Free Market 14, no. 6 (June 1996) Normal people look right past the tiny cars beloved by environmental groups, self-appointed consumer advocates, and the federal government. These are joyless machines like the three-cylinder Geo Metro XFi and Honda Civic VX, ugsome little pods designed not for comfort, utility, or performance, but rather to
The Free Market 14, no. 9 (September 1996) If there’s anything a government bureaucrat hates more than the unhampered market, it’s the automobile. He’ll do anything to take it away from people, though of course he’ll couch his true intentions in euphemistic banalities about “cleaning up the air.” So-called “clunker” laws are a case in point.
The Free Market 15, no. 5 (May/June 1997) Some scientists boycotted a recent conference that examined the EPA’s draconian proposal to regulate ultra-small soot particles. The sponsoring organization, the Annapolis Center, gets corporate money. According to Harvard epidemiologist Joel Schwartz, that makes the event look “like a set-up job.” The
The Free Market 15, no. 10 (October 1997) This summer, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it had effectively decontaminated dioxin-laced soil from what was once the community of Times Beach, Missouri. But while the dirt of this site may now be certifiably clean, it will take much more than an incinerator to decontaminate the
The Free Market 15, no. 11 (November 1997) For ages, man’s right to exploit the living world—to use it for his purposes—went unquestioned. Trees were for lumber, crops for harvesting, animals for eating and skinning as well, of course, as for companionship. When not consumed directly, the products into which human labor transformed living things
The Free Market 15, no. 11 (November 1997) Employees at the Environmental Protection Agency presume to protect us from all sorts of supposed evils. But in doing so, no bureaucrats, save the tax collectors, are more vicious in their trampling of property rights. For example, they have made life miserable for people who own auto salvage and parts
The Free Market 15, no. 12 (December 1997) When the Soviet Union’s central planners failed year after year to produce a respectable grain harvest, they blamed “bad weather.” If only the weather could be controlled, Moscow dreamed, communism might be made to work. Officially, communism is dead, but the bureaucratic obsession with controlling the
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.