Many associated with the Mises Institute have warned of this danger many times, but the closer that vouchers come to reality, the more the private schools themselves are understanding it just as well. See “ Private Schools Leery of Voucher Trade-offs “ in the Washington Post . What if schools that refuse to accept them face competitive
My “ Death by Environmentalism “ article on the Mises page still generates controversy, as it has been reprinted, translated into Spanish, and generally circulated. It has also been a source of problems to me, as one environmentalist emailed our president and demanded I be fired. (She graciously declined to do so.) However, I find that I was
While it does not mean that government is disappearing in Mexico, at least we have a start. At least one city government is trying to eliminate corruption by getting rid of the laws that breed such corruption. Perhaps this might set a good example for cities elsewhere! At least, one can always hope.
Paul Krugman, the Keynesian masquerading as an economist at Princeton, in today’s column in the New York Times writes about the “lump of labor” fallacy of economics. For the most part, he seems to get it right. However, our hero simply is incapable of writing anything on economics without committing at least one major fallacy. Today, Krugman
Proof that even the Weekly Standard runs sensible pieces from time to time: Up in Smoke by Hugh Hewitt (”The core problem is that species protection prohibits many ordinary fire precautions. You cannot clear coastal sage scrub, no matter how dense, if a gnatcatcher nests within it--unless the federal government provides a written permission slip
Along the same lines , Rothbard mentions in passing in What Has Government Done to Our Money that nails were once used for currency. Rothbard mentions Scotland. But in the early days on the American frontier too, nails were so scarce that people often would burn down a home before they moved on. The reason was so they could collect the nails to
The Free Market 21, no. 1 (January 2003) When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union ceased to exist two years later, many western commentators optimistically declared that socialism had fallen with those two entities. However, as we limp from one economic morass into another, it has become clear that the dream of socialism is far
The Free Market 21, no. 2 (February 2003) Late last year, in a move that gives even politics a bad name, the Federal Reserve announced yet another cut in its key interest rates. Around the same time, Fed Governor Ben Bernanke gave a speech praising the power of alchemy to lower the price of gold, and, similarly, the power of the Fed to print as
The Free Market 21, no. 3 (March 2003) When some left-wing activists recently began their What Would Jesus Drive? campaign against sport utility vehicles, the first reaction of most folks—and especially libertarians—was a simple, “Are these people really serious?” It turns out, unfortunately, that they indeed were serious, or at least serious
The Free Market 21, no. ( 2003) When I heard of the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia , one of the first things that came to my mind was how little effect it had upon the lives of ordinary people—as compared to the Challenger disaster of 1986. I was sitting in the stands at a YMCA youth basketball game, and from what I could tell, the
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.