Arthur Levitt is frustrated. He should be. Even by his own admission, Levitt, who held the chairmanship of the SEC longer than anyone else, wasn’t able to catch many of the so-called bad guys that regulators are supposed to nab. Maybe there’s another reason for the regulatory problems. Levitt, whose book entertainingly rampages through most of
The Queens Library System boasts of having one of the largest systems in the nation. But just because a unit of government is big doesn’t mean it is efficient, as I have seen in years of borrowing books from this badly run system. Our large, unaccountable library system proved to me, once again, that the public sector fails at just about
Last year the New York City Subway system carried 1.41 billion passengers. In 1947, the historic high point of ridership, the system carried 2.02 billion. That means the latest numbers constitute an incredible falloff of some 30% in a city whose population has stayed about the same over the past 60 years. This is a remarkable vote of No Confidence
In deciding whether to wage war against yet another regime that has fallen into disfavor with DC, the United States must make some hard choices. Will we follow the traditions of George Washington or those of Woodrow Wilson? As Americans grapple with the hard choices involved in a possible war against Iraq, a larger set of principles is implied in
A review of A History of the Federal Reserve. Volume 1: 1913–1951 by Allan H. Meltzer, foreword by Alan Greenspan Thomas Jefferson, an opponent of our first national bank, is reputed to have said that a national bank is a greater threat to liberty than a standing army. Here, in this interesting book about the history of the first few generations
I am not dead, and that’s even though a part of our magnificent leviathan recently killed me. Our wonderful U.S. Postal Service—which as long as I have been living in this part of Queens has insisted that I live in another section of Queens—recently started stamping all my mail “deceased.” And yes it’s true that lots of people thought I was
Every once in a while, the truth somehow leaks out in Washington. For example, earlier this year Bush administration economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey got the boot. His political crime: He dared to suggest that the occupation of Iraq will cost upwards of $100 billion. In retrospect, it now seems his estimate was, if anything, on the conservative
It’s a huge tax that most Americans don’t understand. And most of those who support leviathan government want to keep it that way. They’re betting on the apathy and ignorance of the average American when this tax is discussed. So they hope you’ll just forget about this burdensome tax, which has been raised dozens of times over the last 40 years,
Will the regulators ever get it right? Are the regulators ever capable of getting it right? This constant infernal tinkering with our lives and businesses never seems to end like the ever expanding bureaucracies that rule us. Regulators, in the midst of various securities industry scandals over mutual finds, are under pressure to come up with a
I’ve just returned from the Security Traders Association’s Washington conference, which had as its featured speaker Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman William Donaldson. My editor and I were naturally looking for exciting stories to fill the pages of Traders Magazine. In a sense, we obtained plenty of news. Donaldson gave us tons of
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.