In a 1991 interview with Randy Paige about why drugs should be legalized, Milton Friedman said that the “main thing that bothers me about crack is not [that it’s addictive], it’s the crack babies, because that’s the real tragedy.” Paige responded by saying, “as you know, we are already experiencing epidemic proportions of that. One out of every
In the modern legal system, the victim of the crime gets punished twice. In the case of a robbery, for example, the victim gets robbed by the thief and then, if the criminal is actually arrested and imprisoned, the victim gets robbed again by the government to fund the incarceration. This makes the case for a prison industry suspect in a free
I could see no reason why I should, at the end of each week, pour the reward of my toil into the purse of my master. When I carried to him my weekly wages, he would, after counting the money, look me in the face with a robber-like fierceness, and ask, “Is this all?” He was satisfied with nothing less than the last cent. He would, however, when I
Anybody who has ever dealt with internet lag should realize that bandwidth is a finite resource. Like any other economically scarce commodity, the price and profit mechanisms of the market serve to direct the allocation of this resource as efficiently as possible. This is why people pay more for faster speeds or larger data caps. The economic
Last month, Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute wrote an article arguing that libertarians should abandon any arguments regarding natural rights. As Lindsey sees it, the concept of natural rights is an “intellectual dead end” and that adherence to natural rights arguments should be abandoned. His perspective can largely be boiled down into two
In 1852, Abraham Lincoln gave a speech in Springfield, Illinois in which he talked about the attempts at required militia training. He described how much of a joke the citizens made of any attempt at mandatory militia training. “No man,” Lincoln said, citing the rules, “is to wear more than five pounds of cod-fish for epaulets, or more than thirty
In a previous article , I wrote about how the war on drugs and the government monopoly on the legal system has created the Tragedy of the Commons in our justice system. Because legislators and police officers have every incentive to appear “tough on crime” but the cost of the sending a criminal to a courtroom is socialized, the courts have become
As many who follow websites like mises.org already know, Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison for running a dark web drug marketplace known as Silk Road under the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts. After receiving his sentence — a deliberately harsh ruling for a man barely in his thirties — Ulbricht’s defense team began to work on his
I came across a clever tweet recently claiming that people who say ”The Nazis were socialists, it’s in the name!” must be ”very confused by buffalo wings.” It is now the conventional wisdom that the Nazis were capitalists, not socialists, despite their misleading name “The National Socialist German Workers Party.” Anybody with a college degree
I discovered an old, obscure study recently that piqued my interests. In 1977, the Police Foundation – a private, non-profit organization dedicated to seeking innovations and improvements in policing — published a study of the San Diego police force entitled “ Patrol Staffing in Sand Diego: One- or Two-Officer Units .” The study is a modest one
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.