The Free Market 15, no. 8 (August 1997) An hour before midnight, February 3, 1997, a sheriff’s car with its lights flashing pulled up to a middle-class home in Effingham County, Georgia. It had come for Debbie Gaskin, wife and mother. She was arrested, handcuffed, fingerprinted, and photographed. She posted bond, and was released. What crime had
The Free Market 15, no. 8 (August 1997) Amid media fanfare, the Pentagon has released its report on U.S. military and foreign policy into the next century. The report says that the U.S. should retain the military capability to fight two foreign wars at once. The Cold War may be over, the Pentagon admits, but it warns against any attempt to pare
The Free Market 15, no. 8 (August 1997) Our domestic automakers produce fine cars and trucks that people freely choose to buy. They make lots of money doing this. So why is the federal government shoveling hundred of millions of dollars annually in corporate welfare their way? Uncle Sam says it’s all in a good cause, funding research to build an
The Free Market 15, no. 8 (August 1997) The Clinton administration has targeted a new batch of global enemies. It wants to crush them with the usual mix of negotiation, treaty, and enforcement through spying, fines, and propaganda. It’s all in a day’s work for the “world’s indispensable nation”—the administration’s new name for itself. Oddly,
The Free Market 15, no. 9 (September 1997) At last, the Republican Congress has proposed cutting death taxes. It wants the exemption to be raised from $600,000 to $1 million. Not bad for a start. But if Congress is serious about reducing the tax, the rate should immediately index the exemption to the inflation rate. If the inflation of the last
The Free Market 15, no. 9 (September 1997) Academia has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent years. Take a look at the recent book catalog of Duke University Press, once a prestigious publishing house. Today it features third-rate, race-obsessed, sex-obsessed, solipsistic tirades masquerading as scholarship. Let’s take a peek. In
The Free Market 15, no. 9 (September 1997) The 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan provided another occasion for the media to celebrate the government’s good works. The U.S.’s headlong plunge into global welfarism (nearly $100 billion in current dollars), they said, saved European economies after the Second World War. One reporter, Garrick
The Free Market 15, no. 10 (October 1997) Princess Diana’s navy velvet dress, auctioned at Christie’s in New York City, went to the highest bidder for $200,000. Despite explosive media attention given to the sale, the bidder’s identity and even nationality is unknown. The auction house, of course, is sworn to secrecy as a matter of contract. The
The Free Market 15, no. 10 (October 1997) Among the tax discussions on Capitol Hill this year are the proposed changes in the 80-year-old inheritance tax. Part of the Republican tax plan calls for an increase in the estate tax exemption from $600,000 to $1,000,000, with considerably larger exemptions for farmers and other small business owners.
The Free Market 15, no. 10 (October 1997) This summer, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it had effectively decontaminated dioxin-laced soil from what was once the community of Times Beach, Missouri. But while the dirt of this site may now be certifiably clean, it will take much more than an incinerator to decontaminate the
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.