Taking for granted the fact that the hippie was part of a diverse group we called “hippies” who, in his varied states of mind, could not be counted upon to think or act like other hippies, there was, and still is, a certain type of hippie, a “hippie with a philosophy,” who actually lived the communal life. The philosophy of the communal hippie was
The judge in the Microsoft antitrust trial, Thomas Penfield Jackson, recently stated that he “didn’t see a distinction” between Bill Gates’s Microsoft Corporation and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. The judge is right, but for the wrong reasons. Like Gates, Rockefeller was the victim of a vindictive political assault on his company for
Joel Klein, the third-rate lawyer/political hack who is in charge of the government’s Microsoft persecution, recently tried to rationalize the lawsuit by saying that it was in keeping with the long history of consumer protection regulation, beginning with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. In reality, the history of antitrust has been a history of
The county-by-county electoral map published by USA Today showing that George W. Bush carried 2,434 counties covering 2.4 million square miles, compared to Al Gore’s 677 counties covering about a half million square miles, suggests that the worst fears of one of America’s greatest statesman and political philosopher, John C. Calhoun, may have
Republican Richard M. Nixon closed the gold window Aug. 15, 1971, breaking the last monetary link with the precious metal. During the next three decades, prices as measured by the CPI more than quadrupled, or, put another way, the value of the U.S. dollar has fallen to 24 cents. Meanwhile, the dollar has lost more than two-thirds of its value
At his Humphrey-Hawkins testimony, chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan was asked whether the Fed attaches any significance to the money supply data. The Fed chairman replied that he regards money as an important variable but admitted that he has difficulty in establishing what part of liquidity constitutes “money.” In short, Greenspan
The Free Market 18, no. 2 (February 2000) At the end of the century, Bill Clinton declared Franklin D. Roosevelt the “man of the century” for having “saved capitalism,” echoing the gushing praise that Newt Gingrich has heaped on FDR, calling him “the greatest figure of the twentieth century.” The greatest phony of the twentieth century would be
The Free Market 18, no. 3 (March 2000) America’ s first wage and price controls were enacted in Massachusetts, a little more than a hundred years after the first pilgrims arrived. The opportunities available in the New World combined with a strong work ethic were raising the wages of working men, to the consternation of their employers. In 1630,
The Free Market 18, no. 3 (March 2000) Legal scholar Gene Healy has made a powerful argument in favor of abolishing the Fourteenth Amend ment to the US Constitution. When a fair vote was taken on it in 1865, in the aftermath of the War for Southern Independence, it was rejected by the Southern states and all the border states. Failing to secure
Fabrication Mises Review 6, No. 1 (Spring 2000) A NECESSARY EVIL Garry Wills Simon and Schuster, 1999, 365 pgs. Garry Wills is a man with a mission. He wishes to expose for the falsehood that it is a myth that has bedeviled American history. Teachers of heresy such as Thomas Jefferson and John C. Calhoun have maintained that government,
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.