In Purgatory, there probably aren’t any garbage disposals. People there will have to scrape all food remains into the trash, and if so much as an onion bit gets into the drain, it will have to be carefully fished out before the water is turned on, lest the drain clog. And also it will be as in many cities on the East and West coast: the garbage
Somehow people doubt that this is true, but it is a fact: I was a professional chef with a highly regarded firm that served exotic meats such as elephant, giraffe, snake. So who better to take advantage of the remarkable new availability of exotic meats online ? True, there is a challenge here. I’ve never made Yak, Boar, Elk, or Kangaroo. But the
Dealing with personal failure is one of the great struggles of growing up. When we are young, the possibilities seem without limit, but as the years pass, we face every manner of barrier that causes us to be all too aware that we face a world with many constraints, many of them due to the limits of the temporal world but also, we must admit,
It has been ten years since my office was last cleaned. It was like opening a time capsule — and not just because what I found was old. What I found represented a different epoch, a time when all things that mattered were subject to the law of scarcity: what one had no one else could have and therefore it was treasured and hoarded for all
Since at least the 12th century until very recently, entry into a profession has come via an apprenticeship, or, in the American terminology, a formal internship. A young person comes to work with people experienced in a trade, usually in exchange for office space, housing, tools to use, but little or no monetary compensation. Everyone wins: the
I’m on a Sunday walk and a nice boy tries to sell me lemonade. A budding entrepreneur! Still, I decline. So he strengthens his pitch: “I’m donating the profits to stop child abuse.” Still I decline, and more easily now that he has linked his praiseworthy commercial venture with a big social pathology that a 12-year-old boy can’t possibly solve —
Checking out at the grocery store the other day, I paid for my sack of rolls. The checkout person handed me my bag. “Thank you,” I said. “You’re welcome,” she replied. I walked away with a sense that something was wrong. Do checkout people usually say, “you’re welcome” and nothing else? Not usually. Usually they say, “thank you,” same as the
The title of this book is drawn from one of those defining moments in life in which a small phrase shatters the social-cultural convention and reveals completely new possibilities. I tell the story herein in the essay on morning drinking. A great scholar and Southern gentlemen — a man who has written the ultimate guidebook to the writing of the
With young people nearly shut out of the market (by recession, regulation, “child” labor laws, and ghastly minimum wage laws), I would like to suggest the unthinkable: young people should work for free wherever they can and whenever they can. The reason is to acquire a good reputation and earn a good recommendation. A person who will give you a
My inbox served up the following email just now: I mention I have 62 years and are of Swiss nationality. I contact them in this way because I want to do something that would me very important. And this argument that worries him so much, is make a gift of my good fortune, they are still conscious of my actions despite the short time I have left to
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.