Dear Mr. Reisman— I enjoyed reading your blog just now, but if you go back and read what I wrote, you’ll note that I specifically set a parameter: to qualify a book had to be published in the last two decades. Atlas Shrugged was published, I believe, in 1959. The point I was trying to make is that over the last two decades, as business has become
Paul Krugman is at it again. In today’s New York Times , in his official capacity as a professional bleeding heart “liberal,” he once again revels in his role of flagellating the pursuit of happiness with the whip of human misery. Specifically, he denounces the prospect of the impending Senate vote to abolish the estate tax, on the grounds that
Earlier today I would not have believed it possible that I would write something in praise of an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times. But Nicolas D. Kristof has written an article that demonstrates some serious understanding of a highly charged subject and has had the courage to express it in his column. The title of his article conveys its nature.
A noted economist, Prof. Martin Feldstein of Harvard University, has written an article for the supposedly pro-free-enterprise Wall Street Journal, in which he proposes a system of government gasoline rationing as a means of improving the environment and promoting national security. (The article, titled “Tradeable Gasoline Rights,” appears in the
The collapse of socialism-communism has not only given rise to the remarkable growth of environmentalism, as a replacement outlet for hostility to capitalism, but also to some growth, vastly less considerable of course, in the remnants of the old anarchist movement, which now sometimes calls itself “libertarian” or “left-libertarian.” A leading
Now that my relationship with Pepperdine University has been finalized (I was given the title of “Professor Emeritus”), I want to make my syllabi available to anyone who may be interested. I’ve got basically two of them (one “micro” and the other “macro”). Each of them has eight supplements. The arrangement is somewhat complex and the way I
In a manner reminiscent of witch doctors urging primitive people to sacrifice their sheep and goats in order to mollify the wrath of the gods, today’s environmentalists and their shills in the media and academe repeatedly urge the people of the United States and the rest of the modern world to sacrifice their use of energy and their standard of
I quote the following from Mark Steyn’s column in today’s (March 26, 2006) Orange County Register (his column dealt with the threatened death penalty for a Moslem convert to Christianity): “In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of `suttee’ — the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of
An individual kills someone—for money, out of jealousy, as an act of revenge, or because he doesn’t like his victim’s looks. A chorus of left-”liberals” rushes in to excuse his act, especially if he is poor. He is not responsible, they say. The real criminal is “Society,” for having allowed him to live in the conditions that led him to kill.
The flag is Green now, instead of Red. And the lyrics are different. But the tune is still the same old tune. When the Reds sang it, the lyrics were that the individual could not be left free because the result would be such things as “exploitation,” “monopoly,” and depressions. When the Greens sing it, the lyrics are that the individual cannot be
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.