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 17, no. 10 (October 1999) This year marks the 250th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest of all German writers and poets and one of the giants of world literature. In his political outlook, he was also a thorough-going classical liberal, arguing that free trade and free cultural exchange are the keys to authentic
The Free Market 17, no. 10 (October 1999) The politics of discrimination have been a major force for statism for decades. Only recently have some politicians yielded to public pressure to pull back from their absurd enforcement of quotas. Californians rescinded their preferential treatment for protected minorities in state colleges. Courts
The Free Market 17, no. 10 (October 1999) Opinion polls on taxes are the shabbiest of the lot. People are asked questions like: would you rather have Congress cut taxes or provide more essential government services? The results are invariably ambiguous. Reporters then claim that a surprising number of people are pleased with the amount of taxes
The Free Market 17, no. 11 (November 1999) Jesse Ventura, Governor of Minnesota, took a position that is extremely rare in state government. He said that neither the state nor the city nor any other unit of government should spend any money on funding yet another municipal ballpark or providing a taxpayer subsidy to professional ball teams and
The Free Market 17, no. 11 (November 1999) Even when the market produces amazing new technology, it can become a basis for criticism. There are two main excuses used today to justify intervention in the technology market. The first argues that manufacturers build a planned obsolescence into their designs. The second argues that a path dependency
The Free Market 17, no. 11 (November 1999) Garet Garrett wrote in 1932, “Mass delusions are not rare. They salt the human story.” Indeed, mass delusions are no more apparent than in the realm of public policy and especially in the faith people have in their government to carry out functions designed to promote the public good. How else to
The Free Market 17, no. 11 (November 1999) At some point, and nobody knows when, the stock market is going to reverse its climb. It may even collapse. It is interesting to speculate on what kind of political response that would generate. Given the politics of entitlement and the propensity of the Fed to intervene, the picture looks pretty grim.
The Free Market 17, no. 12 (December 1999) The workaholic, or more precisely worry about him, is back. During the 1980s, just as the free market’s reputation was beginning to rebound, the guardians of the national psyche discovered “workaholism.” The victim of this disorder was defined as working compulsively, spending far too much time at his
The Free Market 17, no. 12 (December 1999) Austrian economists should revel in the story of Ukara, a small, Tanzanian island in Lake Victoria. John Reader, in his astoundingly detailed and fascinating work, Africa: A Biography of the Continent (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), presents among a wealth of other information that should be of genuine
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.