The Free Market 14, no. 8 (August 1996) A wealthy broker of questionable repute is trying to sell a mutual fund. If it stock goes up, he says, you profit. If it goes down, he adds, he’ll send you a personal check to put it back on par with the original purchase price. He promises do this forever. Thus its value can’t decline, no matter how much
The Free Market 14, no. 8 (August 1996) “We Russians are doomed to teach mankind,” wrote philosopher Grigory Chaadayev in 1848, “some awful lesson.” The lesson turns out to be more than proving socialism’s brutality and futility. It is also about the unlikelihood that elections alone will resolve a deep social and economic crisis. After the
The Free Market 14, no. 9 (September 1996) In a state-funded education system, bad ideas live longer than they would in a free market. That’s the best explanation for the staying power of the two opposing errors of our time: nihilism and pseudo-omniscience in the social sciences. Nihilism comes in the form of postmodernism, a pretentious body of
The Free Market 14, no. 9 (September 1996) Now in its seventh year, the school voucher experiment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is held up as a model for the nation. But the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has found itself fighting its own track record as much as the city’s public school establishment. The early cascade of hurrahs has slowed in
The Free Market 14, no. 9 (September 1996) If there’s anything a government bureaucrat hates more than the unhampered market, it’s the automobile. He’ll do anything to take it away from people, though of course he’ll couch his true intentions in euphemistic banalities about “cleaning up the air.” So-called “clunker” laws are a case in point.
The Free Market 14, no. 9 (September 1996) Shannon Faulkner’s two-and-a-half year fight to become the first woman in The Citadel’s corps of cadets went out with an embarrassing whimper. She couldn’t handle the physical and psychological demands of Hell Week, landed in the infirmary, and dropped out. Case settled? Far from it. The Supreme Court
The Free Market 14, no. 9 (September 1996) Media personality Kathie Lee Gifford took quite a pounding when the National Labor Committee, a labor union organization, found that some of the clothes sold under her label in the U.S. were made by children in a Honduran “sweat shop.” Union lobbyists and their paid-for politicians paraded 15-year-old
The Free Market 14, no. 10 (October 1996) In an episode of “Married With Children,” Jefferson Darcy tells Al Bundy that he can get fast cash by suing a mall for his stress-related injury. “Malls set aside millions for this type of thing,” says Darcy. “If we don’t get it, it’ll go to Social Security and then no one will get it!” Everyone laughs,
The Free Market 14, no. 10 (October 1996) The good news is that supply-siders want to cut taxes. The bad news is...well, let’s accentuate the positive for the moment. The supply-siders reject Washington’s tendency to think in static terms. To most politicians and bureaucrats, the economy is a pie for the tax collectors and special interests to
The Free Market 14, no. 10 (October 1996) Pizza deliverers have been robbed, assaulted, and killed. To protect their employees, and hold down liability losses, pizza chains like Domino’s won’t deliver pizzas in the highest crime areas. The company has cleverly developed computer software that allows its franchises to “flag” addresses that are
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.