Back on November 9, 1989 I lived in Auburn, Alabama. On that morning I looked at the front page of my daily paper and to my amazement a cut out map was shown on the front page with the name “Nickelsdorf” in big letters above a dot indicating a little town in Austria, about 7 miles from the Hungarian border. I was amazed because in 1953, in
Sixty-year old Jan Davis plunged to her death because her borrowed parachute didn’t open during a jump she made from El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park, on October 22. Her death immediately sparked a storm of controversy concerning how much risk people should be permitted to undertake in a free society. When adventurers want to indulge their
Socialism was shown back in 1922, in Ludwig von Mises’ book by that name, to be an impossible economic system. Von Mises demonstrated that a planned economy cannot allocate resources effectively, so that those who need things and those who can produce them are properly linked up to communicate with one another. Only in a free market is this
One of the complaints raised at the WTO meetings in Seattle, Washington, echoes the accusations that have for years been leveled at Nike, Kathy Lee Gifford, WalMart and others, all of whom have employed workers abroad who charge far less for their labor than do workers in most Western countries, especially in the US. It is that it is evil to pay
The Free Market 17, no. 7 (July 1999) Free markets may be productive, a common complaint runs, but they lead to unjust results. For instance, writing in The New Republic (March 29, 1999) Cass R. Sunstein of the University of Chicago School of Law closes a book review this way: A familiar problem with unrestricted free markets is that they can
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.