Two winters ago back-to-back Nor’easters slammed the mid-Atlantic coast in Maryland and Delaware, causing significant beach erosion and damage to vacation homes, boardwalks, and businesses. Being the owner of a condo in Ocean View, Delaware, I went down to check on any damage. Although it was the middle of February, the ocean resort towns were
From Investors Business Daily February 16, 1999 By launching a multibillon-dollar ‘’livability agenda’’ in its fiscal year 2000 budget, the White House has catapulted a six-letter word from local zoning meetings to the national political stage: sprawl. For most people, sprawl means suburban development that’s gone too far. Lots of folks aren’t
The Free Market 17, no. 9 (September 1999) The Mississippi River Basin is the largest river basin in the world, and stretches from New York to Idaho and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. In the course of American history, the river often flooded, but not until 1927 had so many people been killed and left homeless and never had such a large land
The Free Market 17, no. 11 (November 1999) Garet Garrett wrote in 1932, “Mass delusions are not rare. They salt the human story.” Indeed, mass delusions are no more apparent than in the realm of public policy and especially in the faith people have in their government to carry out functions designed to promote the public good. How else to
The Free Market 17, no. 12 (December 1999) Once again, the federal government is scrambling to make good on its own past mistakes. And private industries are facing massive costs, and potentially massive lawsuits, because of their attempt to keep up with federal regulators’ changing whims. The controversy over Methyl tert-Butyl Ether (MTBE)
This article ran in the Journal of Commerce , May 5, 1999: By now, virtually every public school student in the country has heard about the supposed environmental catastrophe of deformed frogs. Everywhere you look, it is said, there are frogs being born with severe disabilities: too few or too many limbs, and misshapen eyes and toes. And the
You might have thought it was a bad thing that Hurricane Floyd caused loads of property damage, flooded whole towns, interrupted commutes, and generally mucked everything up. This is a fair assumption. But it is one to which economists are sometimes blind. It never fails: after some natural disaster an economist pops up to reassure folks that
The Journal of Commerce June 15, 1999 In December 1997, the Clinton administration signed the Kyoto Protocol, a United Nations treaty committing developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. It is potentially a very expensive agreement on several levels. If ratified, Kyoto would require the United States to reduce its carbon
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.