New regulations that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has handed down in the wake of last Tuesday’s murderous attack include several that are arbitrary, burdensome, and unlikely to make our airplanes or airports any safer. Some of these rules have left pilots, passengers, and security experts scratching their heads. Abolishing curbside
President Bush is right to recognize the fruitful role of America’s private, faith-based “armies of compassion.” For many reasons, such groups are far more effective in solving social problems—poverty, homelessness, and illiteracy, to name a few—than are government programs and bureaucracies. They treat the whole person, which means they get to
Among those who see privatization--the disassociation of government from goods and services that are otherwise economically viable---as a very desirable thing, a debate has raged for quite some time. Should government subsidize what is being privatized as a step away from nationalization? The same sort of debate would be quite appropriate when it
Propose that energy needs be met through more production, and up will go the cry from the left: not production but conservation! Have these people had a new idea since the New Deal? In 1943, the Government Printing Office for the Office of Price Administration made a placard that read: “When you ride ALONE you ride with Hitler!” Hence, supporting
Waiting To Inhale . By Alan Bock. (Seven Locks Press, 2000, 286 pages) $18.95. Alan Bock, senior editorial writer for the Orange County Register , knows marijuana. Bock has covered California’s medical marijuana initiative, Proposition 215, since the movement began in 1996. His book, Waiting to Inhale , gives its readers a smoking inside look at
As layoffs continue to mount during this economic downturn, let us reflect on the purpose of the labor market, with a special focus on the market I know best: academic music. A classmate once told me he would become a university faculty member or an overeducated, “bitter, underemployed vagabond.” He got his PhD in social psychology; I got my MS in
Few people complain about high interest rates or having trouble finding credit during periods of sustained growth. Wages rise, assets increase in value, and capital is abundant. The last time we heard all the fallacious arguments about inflation not being that bad and low interest rates being essential for growth was in the early 1990s, when
[The following essay is from the personal papers of John William Lloyd, a 19th century radical who contributed to a pioneering periodical named Liberty . Liberty was edited by Benjamin Tucker, an early individualist anarchist, passionate opponent of state socialism, and author of essays collected in Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write
Canada has more fresh water than practically any other nation on the face of the earth. Yet Canada is in the midst of a summer drought. Parched brown fields are reported from coast to coast, and agricultural crops face devastation if the rains don’t come soon. This is not the first summer, however, that Canadians have faced water shortages; it
In her April 12, 2001, column in The Washington Post , ominously entitled “ Think of the Children ,” Mary McGrory concludes that the government should help out more. She relates the story Elizabeth “Cookie” Jones of Washington, a young single mother of three who was profiled by Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Katherine Boo 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.