Joseph Stiglitz shared the Nobel Prize in 2001 partly on the basis of an important paper of his (with Greenwald): “Externalities in Economies with Imperfect Information and Incomplete Markets.” In that paper he says: “There exist government interventions (e.g., taxes and subsidies) that can make everyone better off.” Stiglitz is a prolific,
Libertarian writers fight uphill battling regulation after regulation. Any small tariff, restriction, and tax create adverse effects. Often, laws are so mangled together that one cannot make a difference with the removal of only one element. Sometimes, however, the change of one regulation can make a world of difference. I offer a change with a
Most people listening to libertarian ideas are thrown off by the thought that private charity, in absence of government programs, will handle problems involving truly helpless people. Charitable organizations are active but no one knows for sure how much donations would increase in a tax-free society. When a person becomes old without savings,
Marxists long theorized that communism would bring about the new socialist man. Through communist programs, man would turn his sole purpose to laboring and struggling for the greater good of the collective. Through socialist policies and redistribution, New Orleans has raised from its ruin a new socialist man. However, instead of working for the
Advocates of replacing the income tax with the FairTax — a consumption tax in the form of a national retail sales tax (NRST) on new goods and services — regularly point to the complexity of the tax code, the millions of hours and dollars wasted on compliance costs, the evils of the withholding tax, and the abuses of the IRS to bolster their case
If you say that government is too big and truly overweening, you elicit a surprising degree of agreement among people, even mainstream columnists, economists, and nearly everyone. Even government employees, who famously resent their bosses, might be quick to agree. If you hang outside the offices of the IRS in Washington, D.C., in the park at
This talk was delivered to the Auburn University Libertarians on February 16, 2006. As all students today know, Iraq is the country that the US invaded with the attempt to convert the state and the people from enemy to friend. On the face of it, this sounds rather implausible, of course. Good fences make good neighbors. Friendship and peace are
Well, aren’t we all having lots of fun heaping scorn and derisive laughter on Senator Ted Stevens for his hilariously uninformed commentary on how the internet works? The audio is all over the web, and doesn’t he just sound ridiculous? Actually, I’m not sure that a single elected official in this country, at any level of government, could speak
There is a predictable annual ritual which begins when the Census Bureau releases its estimates that roughly one eighth of Americans live in poverty, and that this proportion has been relatively invariant in recent years despite the steady rise of per capita real incomes. This is followed by predictable rant by the anti-free-market crowd who
Archived recordings of this event are available . Imperialism takes many forms, and is driven by many motivations, but its result has this in common with all forms of state interventions: it fails to achieve the overt aims of its proponents and it leaves the subjects touched by it less free. It is now widely understood that the US in the
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.