Environmentalism sees market failure as the cause of environmental problems. Block sees the absence of private property rights and the interference of government as the causes of problems. Libertarianism provides solutions. Man is not a cancer on the planet. Markets have not failed. Endangered Species Acts encouraged negative incentives of shoot,
Enron : $1 billion write-down of retained earnings, followed by $618 million quarterly loss. 21,000 put out of work in ensuing bankruptcy. CFO Andrew Fastow sentenced to ten years in prison. Jeff Skilling and Kenneth Lay arrested and charged with federal crimes. Worldcom : $10 billion inflation of profits through failure to record expenses. CFO
President Bush tells us to drive less and limit trips to only the essentials, while the EPA’s EnergyStar program is urging us all to “change a lightbulb” in our homes, from a regular one to a government-approved one, which they claim will save hundreds of millions. You are also supposed to take a pledge : “I pledge to do my part to save energy
Economic ignorance rises to the top: that seems to be one explanation for FEMA’s continued support of building in flood-prone areas, and Congressional demands for FEMA to do even more of the same. A Washington Post story (Oct 11, 2005 ) by Gilbert Gaul noted, “The pattern of federal flood payments on Dauphin Island [AL] illustrates the growing
When I once went to visit a public sector electricity-generation plant in New Delhi, one of their top officers told me this: I dump the ash (the residue from burning coal) in the river, I do not pay the railways for delivery of the coal, I do not pay the coal company, and I will keep running it this way. Forget about the so-called charitable
Less than a year after a Tsunami killed approximately 275,000 people in the poorer part of Asia, another 80,000 have died in Pakistan and India from an earthquake that hit on 8 October 2005. An estimated 3.3 million are now homeless in the harsh winter of the region. Close to a million are still sleeping in the open — all at risk of dying —
This fall, school kids across the country will again be taught a chief doctrine in the civic religion: recycle, not only because you fear the police but also because you love the planet. They come home well prepared to be the enforcers of the creed against parents who might inadvertently drop a foil ball into the glass bin or overlook a plastic
The Free Market 26, no. 10 (October 2005) K atrina gave the Gulf region of the United States a lesson in government failure, and how. In the weeks following the hurricane, it became clear that most of the destruction was not the work of Mother Nature but those who are charged with preventing precisely such disasters as this. To begin on a
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.