Former National Football League star Walter Payton has been stricken by a rare liver disease and needs a transplant in order to live. Unfortunately, the demand for available organs far outstrips the supply, and several thousand Americans this year will die waiting for those life-saving organs. When Congress passed the National Organ Transplant Act
One of many virtues of the free economy is its flexibility. It is able to adjust to changing tastes, technology, and resource availability. In a living economy, property rights are secure but the uses to which they are “assigned” is in continual flux. Market signals embody individuals’ subjective valuations of goods and services, and of money
In his recent Wall Street Journal editorial titled “Help the Third World Help Itself” (November 29, 1999), Kofi Annan advanced a statist agenda for improvement in the developing world. This is what we would expect from the acting secretary-general of the United Nations. Improvement necessarily always begins with government for people in positions
The Eighteenth Amendment, providing for complete Prohibition in the United States, was ratified in 1919 and repealed in 1933. That is fourteen years of attempted interdiction of alcoholic beverages, from which we learned nothing. Prohibition was practiced by some states before and after the federal amendment, but it probably would never have been
Sixty-year old Jan Davis plunged to her death because her borrowed parachute didn’t open during a jump she made from El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park, on October 22. Her death immediately sparked a storm of controversy concerning how much risk people should be permitted to undertake in a free society. When adventurers want to indulge their
Investor’s Business Daily April 16, 1999 Why the Worst Get On Top When ‘’The Road To Serfdom’’ was published, smart people turned up their noses at the groundbreaking free-market book. In Great Britain - where the book’s author, economist F.A. Hayek lived - the Labor Party was in ascendancy. The U.S. was still swooning over the New Deal. Most
From INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY Appearing on July 9, 1999 If voters named you economic czar, what would you do? Let’s say you got rid of the market economy. You had to plan all output yourself. Could you do it? Well, let’s make your task a little easier. You just have to plan the production of this year’s wheat crop. You have to get it to market at
A year ago July, I sent my girlfriend some flowers. I picked up the phone, called a florist, and, for about thirty dollars, she received one dozen roses. Seven months later, for Valentine’s Day, I called the same florist and again ordered one dozen roses for my girlfriend. This time, however, they would cost one hundred twenty dollars. I was
The Legal Intelligencer April 14, 1999 Patently Obvious By Shannon P. Duffy U.S. Courthouse Correspondent Promising to slash the costs of litigating patent cases–both in money and time–a group of in-house and private patent lawyers are touring the country to persuade their colleagues to join the newly formed National Patent Board. Dubbed “a court
I reside in Indian River County, Florida, where jury duty is mandated by statute, as in most states. This means that the courts in the County are authorized to “summon” specific individuals for service in civil and criminal proceedings as jurors. A failure to respond to the jury duty summons will be considered a “contempt of court”; and a fine not
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.