The Free Market 14, no. 4 (April 1996) Should free enterprise stop at the border? Of course not, and the attempt to make it so can drive us to ruin. Yet politicians are hammering free trade. Long-refuted myths are back in full force, and the voters are getting a miseducation in the economics of autarky. The politicians criticizing free trade are
The Free Market 24, no. 7 (July 2004) T he psychology of the anti-market left can be a puzzle, but even more confounding is the mentality of the anti-market right. There are agrarians, medievalists, and nationalists, and, above all, the neoconservatives, who dread the market as much as any socialist from days of yore. Their critique differs, but
[This talk was given at the LRC Health and Wealth Conference in Foster City, California, December 2, 2006.] With the Democrats taking charge in Congress, we will surely hear talk of mandatory national health insurance, more spending for health care for the poor and elderly, and more taxes on individuals and business to pay for the whole scheme.
I’m reading about the remarkable push by IBM’s Stuart S.P. Parkin to shrink the physical size of data memory to 100 th of its present bulk. It’s an amazing prospect, and we aren’t talking about technological advance for its own sake. “That means,” says the New York Times writer who knows how to interest readers in what would otherwise be arcane,
The claim of the Austrian School that has scandalized members of other schools for 150 years is the following. The propositions of economics are universal. The principles apply in all times and all places, because they derive from the structure of reality and human action. What brought about economic growth, inflation, or the business cycle in
President Bush began his second term with a big push for “Social Security privatization.” I put the words in quotes to point out that neither his plan, nor any mainstream plan, is actual privatization. What he proposed was the gradual replacement of a publicly funded welfare program — those premiums you pay are really just taxes — with a mandatory
Official data are starting to reveal what close observers have suspected for some time. Layoffs are increasing. Unemployment is on the rise. It now stands at a four-year high of 5.7 percent, which is not high by historical standards, but it stings when you consider that the rate dipped below 4 percent in the late 1990s. What worries people is the
[This is the introduction to The Left, the Right, and the State .] In American political culture, and world political culture too, the divide concerns in what way the state’s power should be expanded. The Left has a laundry list and the Right does too. Both represent a grave threat to the only political position that is truly beneficial to the
Writing in The State and Revolution in 1917, Vladimir Lenin summed up the economic aim of socialism as follows: “To organize the whole economy on the lines of the postal service.” Incredible, isn’t it? After centuries of treatises and miles of paper and tubs of ink, this is the great historical turning point: government employees carrying sacks
The Free Market 20, no. 10 (October 2002) What a sight: the legislative and executive branches of government celebrating as they impose new criminal codes against corporate fraud, each politician trying to outdo the other in their moral outrage against business. These are people who created and guard what is perhaps the greatest financial fraud
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.