The Spanish banking sector is getting used to judicial setbacks. Unfortunately, they’re not the sorts of setbacks we’d like to see. This could have been an article on the elimination of the legal privileges — e.g., the existence of a state-owned central bank in charge of bailing out its (equally) irresponsible fellows — that financial businesses
The US government’s efforts against illicit drugs have finally run their course. With over one trillion dollars wasted over the past several decades and nothing to show but failure , taxpayers are beginning to ask a simple yet pertinent question: Is it time to end the bottomless funding of this utterly ineffective anti-drug crusade? With a $29
The National Institute for Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse recently released a disturbing report on drug overdose deaths. The number of drug overdoses from both legal and illegal drugs increased from approximately 22,000 in 2002 to over 52,000 in 2016, making it a leading cause of accidental death. Even more disturbing is the
The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops — no, but the kind of man the country turns out. — Ralph Waldo Emerson In case any reader still clings to the platitude that the American political system is based on the proposition that ours is “a society of laws, and not of men,” I urge you to pay close
Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump’s choice for US Attorney General, has the potential to threaten recent gains in state-level opposition to federal laws. As an enthusiastic supporter of the Drug War — if he is confirmed as Attorney General — Sessions will be in a position to clamp down on statewide efforts to legalize marijuana by utilizing state-level
In the 1950s, Corsican gangsters such as Lucky Luciano created a mafia empire by smuggling morphine base from Turkey to Sicily, where it was refined into heroin, then shipped to France and finally to the United States. This was the infamous “French Connection” that supplied the bulk of the heroin supply that the United States received through the
Compared to the general population, advocates of a minimal state and those of a stateless society overwhelmingly agree on a vast majority of political issues. I wish to argue here that there should be at least one more agreement between them than there traditionally has been: policing services need not be monopolized by the state and would be more
With last weeks’s beginning of Ken Burns’ new documentary about the Vietnam War, the war will be brought back to the front burner for national discussion and debate. There is one thing that is crystal clear and indisputable about the U.S. intervention into Vietnam’s civil war: The intervention was illegal under our form of government. That’s
In recent years, numerous states have been passing new reforms of the long-abused civil asset forfeiture in which police agencies seize private property without any due process. At least 11 states, plus the District of Columbia, have passed new reforms. Some reforms, such as those in New Mexico and Nebraska, prohibit asset forfeiture altogether in
In the modern legal system, the victim of the crime gets punished twice. In the case of a robbery, for example, the victim gets robbed by the thief and then, if the criminal is actually arrested and imprisoned, the victim gets robbed again by the government to fund the incarceration. This makes the case for a prison industry suspect in a free
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.