A 1997 readers’ poll conducted by Britain’s Channel 4 and the Waterstone’s bookstore chain voted J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings the “greatest book of the century.” A 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers went even further, choosing it as the “greatest book of the millenium.” And now, Peter Jackson’s dramatization of The Fellowship of the Ring
The UK government is contemplating a radical reform of the British political system through far-reaching changes to the Parliament’s second chamber, the House of Lords. The socialists who favor this reform know exactly what they are doing. The result cannot be good for liberty and property, which have been under attack in Britain for a very long
Russell Crowe is sure to win Best Actor for his portrayal of Nobel Prize-winning economist and mathematician John Nash in “A Beautiful Mind.” The movie itself may win Best Picture. In real life, Nash was a brilliant young man, a young man who could solve mathematical conundrums, break codes, and intuit the laws of economics. But then, seemingly at
Is it mere coincidence that the movie “Frida” stars and is co-produced by Hayek (Salma, that is)? Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter of the early to mid 20 th century, renowned for her self-portraits. She and her on again, off again husband, Diego Rivera, himself a great muralist, were famous for their avante-garde lives and for their romance with
I didn’t watch any of the Winter Olympics that recently concluded in Salt Lake City, but it was hard not to hear of the controversies that defined them. Early in the games, the tempest over the judging of the figure-skating competition dominated the news, after gold medals were awarded, first to the Russian pair, and then to the Canadian pair two
I receive many emails commenting on my articles that appear on Mises.org, and 99 percent of them are thoughtful comments or rebukes. The other 1 percent sound something like this one (in response to my article “ Enron’s Long Shadow “): Sir, I am astonished and disgusted with your mischaracterization of the California energy market and Enron’s
Among the greatest failures of the free-market intellectual movement has been to allow its ideas to be categorized as a “public policy” option. The formulation implies a concession that it is up to the state--its managers and kept intellectuals--to decide how, when, and where freedom is to be permitted. It further implies that the purpose of
The “leftist slant” of the mainstream news media in the United States tends to be in the eye of the beholder. For example, when former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg claimed in his recent book Bias that mainstream news figures such as Dan Rather and others demonstrated outward leftist sentiments, the attacks upon him by his former colleagues
With the passing of John Gotti , the former “head” of the Gambino crime family, we have been treated to a series of media stories, some of which condemn the Teflon Don and others versed in a grudging admiration for this character. These stories have managed to miss nearly every lesson this violent man’s life had to show us. Gotti was by all
As an economist, I must admit to more than a passing interest in who receives the annual Nobel Prize for Economics. While the results generally have been disappointing--witness one of last year’s winners, Joseph Stiglitz, who has argued that socialism and other forms of government intervention can serve as a “signaling” device to denote high
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.