The Free Market 14, no. 4 (April 1996) There it is, on the cover of Newsweek , in thick, blood-red letters: “Corporate Killers.” What follows is mug-like photo after photo, some of them grainy, of rich white men, all menacing and “greedy.” They are the CEOs of America’s top corporations. The story’s thesis is simple: they are destroying the
The Free Market 14, no. 5 (May 1996) It was November 25, 1945, and the overpaid workers at General Motors were striking, again. Their gripe? Company profits were up, but wages were not. They demanded a shorter workweek and higher pay. Then as now, this government-backed union was using its legal privileges to stick it to consumers and employers.
The Free Market 15, no. 4 (April 1997) The Washington Times asked the new UN head why he thinks the agency has a PR problem in the United States. “It is a leftover from the late seventies and eighties,” he said, “when there was a lot of talking about getting government off the back of people.” Right, but it’s more of a living reality than a
The Free Market 15, no. 12 (December 1997) After hundreds of years of attacks on Christmas, economists have finally gotten into the act. Yale University’s Joel Waldfogel, writing in the American Economic Review , condemns what he calls “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas.” Once you cut through the calculus and graphs, his conclusion is clear:
The Free Market 17, no. 7 (July 1999) The internet provides a remarkable test case of the free market. What have we learned? Business doesn’t need government to succeed. Independence is the trait that sums up the attitude of all successful web entrepreneurs. But this model of market success is not to be found in most textbooks of American
The Free Market 18, no. 1 (January 2000) From the 1930s through the 1980s , government claimed it could innovate better than private markets. That’s what the boondoggles like TVA, Nasa , and Semitech were all about. Hardly anyone believes that anymore, so the rationale for government regulation of technology has changed. It now concerns such
The Free Market 27, no. 1 (January 2009) Today the highest-price good that people buy besides their houses is their car, and this reality leads people to believe that we can’t possibly let the American car industry die. We couldn’t possibly be a real country and a powerful nation without our beloved auto industry, which is so essential to our
The Free Market 9, no. 5 (May 1991) Governments have always intervened in the economy, but today’s State—armed with modern data collection as well as an interventionist ideology—has taken us to a new level of regulation and taxation. Faced with this, people find less costly ways to work, produce, and exchange, even if it means doing so
The Free Market 13, no. 1 (January 1995) The phrase “End Welfare As We Know It” is a classic Clinton evasion. It sounds bold and “neoliberal” at first, but on close examination it collapses into nothingness. Almost any change in a policy qualifies as ending it “as we know it.” It could mean cuts. It could also mean more spending and
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.