Bill McKibben, a virulent environmentalist, was given the job of reviewing Peter Huber’s new, market friendly work on the environment, Hard Green:Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists (Basic Books, 1999), for The New York Review of Books . And he certainly has done his best to attempt to obliterate Huber’s idea that perhaps
Since the early 1970s, landowners have been at the mercy of federal regulators wielding their power over private property deemed to be wetlands. But there’s also some good news: Federal wetland policies have suffered setbacks from court decisions limiting regulatory overreach. And a case now in appeal to the Supreme Court could provide the relief
From the December 1999 issue of The Free Market Volume 17 Number 12 News item: “The Clinton administration has decided to phase out the controversial fuel additive MTBE, citing risks to public health and the environment.” Once again, the federal government is scrambling to make good on its own past mistakes. And private industries are facing
The Free Market 18, no. 5 (May 2000) When one thinks of “death by government,” either those killed by armed members of the state or the millions who have perished in the vast gulags and prisons run by governmental agents usually come to mind. However, government has demonstrated far more creativity in eliminating people than just by shooting or
The Free Market 18, no. 11 (November 2000) You’ve heard that government policies can cause unanticipated bad effects? This view is confirmed many times over when you consider the current forest-fire fiasco. Government is the cause of the fires that raged out of control across the West this summer, just as surely as if the Forest Service had
The Free Market 18, no. 12 (December 2000) Many of us have had close calls or experienced rude behavior from distracted drivers with handheld cellular phones pressed to their ears. Some can tell hair-raising stories, and a small number of fatal auto accidents are said to be attributable to cell phone use. But to the policy elite, it is not
During a religion class in my junior year of college, our leftist professor showed us a series of films glorifying the communist revolution in China. The “liberation,” he told us, had saved the Chinese from a miserable existence and had both raised their standard of living and had given them new spiritual life. Like so many other stories of
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.