[An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Nathaniel Foote, is available for download .] By pure luck, I happened to sit down next to a man last week who has been my benefactor for my entire life and the large part of his, and yet we had never met. In fact, though he has been serving me faithfully for three decades, looking after my
Thank goodness we’ve got a global marketplace where banned and nearly banned products can be purchased with a click. This is how I obtained a box of Savogran Trisodium Phosphate, which sounds like an explosive but is really just a cleanser that was in every dish-washing soap until last year. It is made of phosphorous, an element from bone ash or
I’m old enough to have a vague memory of clothes so white that they were called bright. This happened despite the absence of additives — the ridiculous varieties of sprays and bottles and packets that festoon our cabinets today and that we throw into the wash to try to boost the cleaning power of our pathetic machines and increasingly useless
“With the focus on food and cooking, we can see what it is that drives daily life among the Haitian multitudes.” A Travel Channel episode of No Reservations , a cooking-focused show narrated by Anthony Bourdain, took viewers to Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I had heard that the show offered unique insight into the country and its troubles. I couldn’t
My musical interests are rooted in history from a half-millennium ago, and so I probably carry around some cynicism concerning contemporary pop music. I had thereby assumed that Justin Bieber was just another industry-created, auto-tuned pop icon manufactured for popular consumption just like soap or the latest footwear fashion. Surely every
Sometimes 2.0 is just much better than 1.0, and here we see the big problem with intellectual-property protection.” The 2010 Disney animated feature Tangled tells the story of Rapunzel in a version much better than the original. The original had only one gimmick — the hair of the girl in the tower that the evil pretend mother and also the lover
A really cool thing is happening in Germany. After decades of strict laws regulating when stores can open and close ( Ladenschlussgesetz ), the laws are progressively liberalizing. Since 2006, the decision has been left to the individual states. Whereas commercial establishments once could not open their doors before 6 a.m. or keep them open past
Last week, this office had to send a fax, and the receiving number was the same for fax and voice lines. Of course that trick never really worked well in the 1980s, and it doesn’t work well today. The fax didn’t get there, and I had to go through the error logs to figure out why, and then try again. That meant hunkering down, again, over a machine
If you are looking for an archetype of disgusting protectionism — benefiting special interests, pillaging consumers, and impoverishing foreigners — the case of the catfish gets my vote. After communism vanished in Vietnam in the 1990s, entrepreneurs started exporting its catfish. The stuff was so good that it threatened US producers. So in 2003,
Housing prices hitting 2002 levels, unemployment still at 9 percent, private-sector job growth flat, and retail sales still struggling: these are headlines that few expected three years ago. The prevailing theory in Washington was that the recession was somehow precipitated (and therefore vaguely caused) by the crash in housing prices, and many
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.