The Free Market 18, no. 8 (August 2000) After attending a leading business school for the last year, I have been witness to capitalist bashing that rivals that of high schools and colleges. The chilling part is that these schools are training future business managers working in a free-enterprise system. In fact, the business schools that produce
The Free Market 18, no. 8 (August 2000) In The Constitution of Liberty Friedrich Hayek warned that the rule of law could evolve into the rule of despotism unless the rules that are enforced by the state are known, certain, and prospective rather than retrospective. Throughout history, a hallmark of governmental tyranny has been the opposite kind
The Free Market 18, no. 8 (August 2000) The president of the United States was ecstatic. Never had economic prospects in this country looked better. Unemployment was at its lowest level in years, the rate of inflation was relatively low, and the economy had grown continuously for almost eight years. No doubt, said the experts, this country was
The Free Market 18, no. 8 (August 2000) Francis Fukuyama, the famed author of The End of History , has tried his hand at political prognostication on the question of socialism. Writing in Time Magazine, he argues that full-blown socialism is dead for the foreseeable future. There will be no more attempts to fully collectivize the means of
The Free Market 18, no. 9 (September 2000) Mt. Rushmore is famous because 60 years ago, someone carved the faces of four dead presidents into its lofty Harney Peak granite cliffs. The mountain itself is located in the Black Hills, a somewhat obscure mountain range in western South Dakota and eastern Wyoming that resembles the Southern
The Free Market 18, no. 9 (September 2000) For two years, the White House has been haranguing owners of large websites, telling them not to violate their visitors’ supposed right to privacy. Now, just on the face of it, this is absurd. The proper way to think about websites is as private property. When you go to a website, you are a visitor on
The Free Market 18, no. 9 (September 2000) Dictatorships always immediately ban short selling,” wrote Fred Schwed, Jr., in his fun 1940 book on investing, “since it is axiomatic with them that no professional pessimists are going to be tolerated.” Indeed, the long-vilified bearish practice called short selling involves a sale of borrowed stock
The Free Market 18, no. 9 (September 2000) The economic ignorance of politicians and bureaucrats never surprises me, and the recent events concerning rising oil prices are no different. Recently Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) accused the oil industry of “gouging” the public stating “It’s an increase directly attributable to profit-taking by the
The Free Market 18, no. 10 (October 2000) On the Internet, a war between government-backed trademark holders and small web entrepreneurs is heating up. Thanks to the current managers of the Internet and a little-known agency of the United Nations, the trademark holders are winning. This past July, Tarek Ahmed of Brooklyn, New York, found
The Free Market 18, no. 10 (October 2000) The Heritage Foundation is no flaming libertarian organization. Not for them the radical privatization of such things as bodies of water, roads, even social security, much less courts, armies, and police. But they are, after all, a conservative organization, so a person would think he could rely on
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.