According to this UPI article , Will Smith is gearing up to make Greenbacks , a movie about “a plot to destabilize the world economy though a sophisticated money counterfeiting plot.” Should be amusing to see the movie’s treatment of the economics involved, whether it gets them right or wrong. Given that it’s from the people who brought us Double
By coincidence, just yesterday I discovered Ayn Rand Answers (referenced below by Mr. Tucker) at the library and checked it out. So far, I’ve been surprised at how much I like Rand on so many things. I had become so used to ignoring some of her warmongering and libertarian-hating followers that I had forgotten how good she can be when she is good.
I thought bashing great chain bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders went out of style about ten years ago, yet here is the New York Times today with a piece lamenting the not-very-newsworthy death of a 26-year-old independent bookstore, Micawber Books in Princeton, New Jersey. The piece struck me with the amount of space it devotes to the
This excerpt from an article on Americans abandoning U.S. automakers provides an idea of just how ignorant one would have to be to believe that “buying American” makes any sense: Justin Watson, a 25-year old laborer and student from Beaumont, Texas, says he is fiercely loyal to American cars. “My great-grandfather, grandfather and father fought
Last Friday, I presented a paper (co-authored with Walter Block) at the 49th Colloquium on the Law of Outer Space at the International Astronautical Conference in Valencia, Spain. Advertising Age , the industry bellwether, interviewed me regarding that paper, and an article related to the paper and the interview has now appeared in the latest
As the much-anticipated Casino Royale opens today, I wonder why it is that many libertarians — perhaps even a disproportionate percentage — like James Bond so much, even though he’s a cold-blooded killer for the state? Some of us may have gotten started with Bond because Ian Fleming was one of the few twentieth-century authors other than herself
Gregg Easterbrook has an excellent piece in Slate tearing apart NASA’s much-heralded plans to put a base on the moon. I especially like that he ridicules the government’s claim that establishing a moon presence will help us create “heritage sites” — i.e., nature preserves of nothing but lunar dust that no one would disturb anyway! Walter Block and
Without government courts, how would consumers find redress against businesses that rip them off? That’s the question I answer, in part, in my article, “ Free-Market Justice is in the Cards ,” published in the April 2005 issue of The Freeman . Free-market justice is merely business as usual for the credit card companies who settle disputes every
Economists discover bubbles (NYTimes, free subscription or bugmenot.com ), and ponder what causes them. While the struggling economists make plausible (if obvious) theories as to why bubbles persist, no where in the article are the root causes of bubbles explored (such as expansionist monetary policies). Of course, the author, Princeton economist
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.