The Free Market 9, no. 1 (January 1991) Project Head Start is supposed to be the exception to the Great Society rule - a welfare program that actually works. David Broder of the Washington Post calls it “the most effective anti-crime and anti-drug program in the nation.” Sen. Edward Kennedy says we should model a “Marshall Plan” in “early
The Free Market 9, no. 1 (January 1991) Certain ways of talking take on a life of their own. In the rituals of habitual speech we sometimes literally forget what we are talking about. We use words in socially plausible patterns but lose the faculty of connecting them with experience. This failing may come from simple mental indolence or from the
The Free Market 9, no. 2 (February 1991) In 1928 Herbert Hoover rode the coattails of Calvin Coolidge into the White House, and everyone thought he would hold the line on taxes, for he talked of “individual freedom” and criticized his opponents as “socialists.” Despite his public rhetoric, however, Hoover was· a believer in the “new economics”
The Free Market 9, no. 3 (March 1991) There has been a veritable revolution in the attitude of the nation’s economists, as well as the public, toward our banking system. Ever since 1933, it was a stem dogma—a virtual article of faith—among economic textbooks, financial writers, and all establishment economists from Keynesians to Milton Friedman,
The Free Market 9, no. 4 (April 1991) Few occurrences have been more dreaded and reviled in the ‘history of economic thought than deflation. Even as perceptive a hardmoney theorist as Ricardo was unduly leery of deflation, and a positive phobia about falling prices has been central to both Keynesian and monetarist thought. Both the inflationary
The Free Market 9, no. 5 (May 1991) Governments have always intervened in the economy, but today’s State—armed with modern data collection as well as an interventionist ideology—has taken us to a new level of regulation and taxation. Faced with this, people find less costly ways to work, produce, and exchange, even if it means doing so
The Free Market 9, no. 6 (June 1991) Ludwig von Mises disliked hardboiled detective novels because he always knew who the murderer would be: not the butler, but a prosperous and respected gentleman of high social standing who pretends to virtue, but is actually a hidden criminal and sanctimonious hypocrite. Mises saw egalitarian envy in such
The Free Market 9, no. 7 (July 1991) Dear Sir: I noticed the following headline in the New York Times recently: “Earnings Plunge at IBM—Quarterly Sales Fall Across Most of Line.” Another Times story reports that IBM “has been pushed out of the personal computer and software spotlight by its software partner, the Microsoft corporation.” A third
The Free Market 9, no. 8 (August 1991) The debate over whether or to what extent we should bail out Gorby ($10 billion? $50 billion? $100 billion? Over how many years?) has almost universally been couched in false and misleading terms. The underlying concept seems to be that the United States government has, through some divine edict, become the
The Free Market 9, no. 9 (September 1991) Environmental activists have recently uncovered a plot to destroy The Planet. A foreign race has managed to infiltrate our most pristine spaces with a simple but devastating scheme: to stomp, chew, and defecate The Planet into oblivion. They are perhaps the least suspect of our fellow fauna. They are 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.