The Free Market 15, no. 5 (May/June 1997) On the presidential campaign trail, Bob Dole spoke often about his own private charity, the Dole Foundation. He used it to showcase his personal compassion for those in need, particularly people with disabilities. In televised debates, he conjured up images of himself and his wife digging into their
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. 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 16, no. 12 (December 1998) The phrase of the day is “moral hazard.” It’s something everyone seems to think is a bad thing, but few are willing to do anything about, certainly not Alan Greenspan. So far, he’s on record backing the Mexican bailout, the Asian bailout, the bailout of Long-Term Capital Management, and more IMF
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 17, no. 9 (September 1999) Making splashy headlines, the National Marriage Project of Rutgers University reported this summer that marriage rates are at an historic low. Americans are waiting longer to get married and are choosing alternative arrangements to marriage. Data showing that divorce is on the decline turn out to be
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 26, no. 8 (September 2008) You are uptown in a shopping district of a small community, and you pass by the meat shop, the wine shop, the coffee shop, two churches side by side, a coin shop, an antique store . . . and hold it right there. A coin shop? This is irresistible, because, as implausible as this may sound, all political
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 27, no. 3 (March 2009) The works of Leonard E. Read, who founded the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 1946, are now online at the Mises Institute. It is probably not the complete collected works, but it is all that he collected in book form. These are books that shaped several generations of activists, donors, writers,
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.