The Free Market 15, no. 1 (January 1997) The furor over the supposed racism of Texaco’s management dramatizes, in miniature, the tragedy and danger of so-called civil-rights legislation. The Texaco story paints a vivid picture of what we’ve become: an economy distorted and abused by a racial spoils system, in which race is pitted against race,
The Free Market 15, no. 4 (April 1997) The Washington Times asked the new UN head why he thinks the agency has a PR problem in the United States. “It is a leftover from the late seventies and eighties,” he said, “when there was a lot of talking about getting government off the back of people.” Right, but it’s more of a living reality than a
The Free Market 15, no. 7 (July 1997) The 5th Street Theater in Seattle, Washington, is one of a dwindling number of houses of its kind. It receives no government money whatsoever. Its revenues come from a permanent endowment and ticket sales to its popular, if small-scale shows. Its charter prevents it from raising money from other private
The Free Market 15, no. 7 (July 1997) The World Trade Organization has a fantastic but undeserved reputation in international circles as the world’s premier institution of free trade. Despite all of the WTO’s pretensions to greatness, this glorified trade-management bureaucracy exists only to promote the interests of well-heeled trade lobbyists
The Free Market 15, no. 7 (July 1997) If you love bad news, devote your life to studying government. You’ll learn about the colossal waste of NASA, the diseases spread by the school-lunch program, the lies of the FBI, the corruption subsidized by foreign aid, and the debauchery of the military base. So where can we turn for good news? To private
The Free Market 15, no. 8 (August 1997) Our domestic automakers produce fine cars and trucks that people freely choose to buy. They make lots of money doing this. So why is the federal government shoveling hundred of millions of dollars annually in corporate welfare their way? Uncle Sam says it’s all in a good cause, funding research to build an
The Free Market 15, no. 11 (November 1997) For ages, man’s right to exploit the living world—to use it for his purposes—went unquestioned. Trees were for lumber, crops for harvesting, animals for eating and skinning as well, of course, as for companionship. When not consumed directly, the products into which human labor transformed living things
The Free Market 15, no. 11 (November 1997) Employees at the Environmental Protection Agency presume to protect us from all sorts of supposed evils. But in doing so, no bureaucrats, save the tax collectors, are more vicious in their trampling of property rights. For example, they have made life miserable for people who own auto salvage and parts
The Free Market 15, no. 12 (December 1997) After hundreds of years of attacks on Christmas, economists have finally gotten into the act. Yale University’s Joel Waldfogel, writing in the American Economic Review , condemns what he calls “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas.” Once you cut through the calculus and graphs, his conclusion is clear:
The Free Market 15, no. 12 (December 1997) Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert , emerged a few years back as one of the cleverest cartoonists in the long history of that art. His eponymous protagonist, by now familiar to everyone, is a software engineer with vaguely defined duties at a large technology firm. Dilbert’s closest
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.