The Free Market 27, no. 1 (January 2009) Today the highest-price good that people buy besides their houses is their car, and this reality leads people to believe that we can’t possibly let the American car industry die. We couldn’t possibly be a real country and a powerful nation without our beloved auto industry, which is so essential to our
The Free Market 27, no. 2 (February 2009) We are fortunate to be living in these times, for we are seeing the unfolding of events long explained and predicted by the Austrian tradition. Maybe that sounds implausible. What is fortunate about our times? The economy is tanking, stocks have been pummeled, unemployment is rising, and Washington is
The Free Market 27, no. 3 (March 2009) The works of Leonard E. Read, who founded the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 1946, are now online at the Mises Institute. It is probably not the complete collected works, but it is all that he collected in book form. These are books that shaped several generations of activists, donors, writers,
The Free Market 27, no. 4 (April 2009) In a March 11 Wall Street Journal op-ed, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan tried to exonerate himself from the housing boom and bust. Even though more and more analysts are realizing that Greenspan’s low interest rates fueled the bubble, the ex-maestro himself uses statistics to defend his
The Free Market 27, no. 5 (May 2009) John Maynard Keynes often employed flowery language like “animal spirits” and “liquidity trap” to describe things he did not understand. He was, after all, more of a bureaucrat than an economist. In fact, he would best be described as an anti-economist because he eschewed things like supply and demand and
The Free Market 27, no. 6 (June 2009) The Summer Fellowship Program has grown by leaps and bounds since its founding by Professor Guido Hülsmann in 2000. This year the program includes eighteen young men and women from the United States, Canada, Germany, Spain, France, Turkey, Denmark, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Their disciplines range
The Free Market 27, no. 7 (July 2009) A majority of Americans now give President Obama’s handling of the economy a negative rating, and many economists and city officials are concerned that Obama’s gargantuan stimulus effort has not given the expected quick boost to the economy. Some argue this is because funds have been slow in coming owing to
The Free Market 27, no. 8 (August 2009) Icelandic Prime Minister Geir Haarde’s resignation this year marked the fi rst political casualty of the current financial crisis that resulted in the collapse of all major banks, a run on deposits, a stock market drop of 90 percent, empty grocery shelves, plus a severe recession. Many commentators
The Free Market 27, no. 11 (November 2009) Most people would admit to hoarding money only with a tinge of guilt, because to be a hoarder carries with it the suggestion of being a miser—a Scrooge. And yet, every participant in an economy based on indirect exchange holds some amount of money and can be said to be hoarding it; that is, declining to
The Free Market 27, no. 12 (December 2009) The government’s measure of unemployment has hit 10.2 percent. Given that the official House version of Obama’s healthcare plan, HR 3962, has now passed, a close examination of the effects of “Obamacare” on the labor market is important. The Democrats’ bill will seriously harm precisely those poor and
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.