What is barbecue? If you ask ten people, you will get ten different answers. And if those ten people are in the same room when you ask them, you might have a fight on your hands. In Texas, barbecue is beef. In Tennessee and most of the rest of the South, it is pork. In North Carolina, the pork is pulled. In other places the pork is chopped or
[This article is based on remarks prepared for a panel on “What’s Wrong With the World?” at Rhodes College on September 29, 2009.] I assume that we all want to use the lives we’ve been given to make the world a better place. This isn’t as straightforward as it seems at first. It is insufficient merely to think globally; and depressingly many kinds
People have spilled a lot of ink both digital and real about the state of the world, kids these years, and the apparent moral and cultural poverty of modernity. We are facing, we are told, an economic crisis unlike anything we have experienced in our lifetimes, with this indicator or that indicator appearing in various outlets alongside the
Here’s a question, paraphrased from Charles Calomiris via Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce : would those who protest globalization and the steady march of economic freedom change their minds if they were convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the globalization, economic growth, and economic freedom they’re
I can’t even bring myself to comment on this : The mounting iPhone 4 controversy has hit a receptive ear in Washington, as Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D., N.Y.) Thursday wrote to Mr. Jobs urging Apple to come up with a “permanent fix” to the problem at no cost to customers. Mr. Schumer asked Apple to provide customers with a clearly written
As part of an ongoing series of papers about Walmart, Big Box retail, and economic change, I’m reading a lot of criticism of big companies that pay low wages and offer skimpy benefits. For Walmart’s critics, this is pretty easy to explain. Some argue that this is part and parcel of the capitalist mode of production. Like every other capitalist
To be added to the list here : 1. The purpose of economic activity is to create employment, not goods and services. 2. Firms’ efforts to increase quality or lower costs are the results of psychological
“I don’t think that’s very good for your blood pressure.” I was sitting on the couch feeding our newborn while my wife was bathing our two-year-old. I had flipped through the channels and had stopped on PBS, where someone was talking about how payday lenders were exploiting the poor. Liberalization: Age of Milton Friedman, also Peter Leeson’s
I recently printed a small mountain of papers for my ongoing research projects about Walmart. One thing this illustrates is just how little we actually know about what we might claim to understand and be able to plan. In our papers on Walmart, Charles Courtemanche and I have estimated the effects of Walmart expansion (measured several ways) on
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.