Two winters ago back-to-back Nor’easters slammed the mid-Atlantic coast in Maryland and Delaware, causing significant beach erosion and damage to vacation homes, boardwalks, and businesses. Being the owner of a condo in Ocean View, Delaware, I went down to check on any damage. Although it was the middle of February, the ocean resort towns were
The nauseating and psychophantic blather in the media about “America’s Royal Family” and its “tradition of public service” seemed to go on forever after JFK, Jr., “America’s Prince,” killed himself, his wife, and his sister-in-law in a plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard. The media circus ended its “coverage” with its anointment of Kathleen
*Presentation prepared for the Mises Institute’s conference, “Austrian Economics and the Financial Markets,” Toronto, Canada, September 16-17, 1999. In 1978 Michael Jensen and William Meckling, writing in the Financial Analysts Journal , offered an extraordinarily gloomy prediction for the future of capitalism: “The most spectacular period of
One way to prove that someone’s idea makes no sense is to show that it entails something absurd. So you say none of us can know anything. Doesn’t this mean you cannot either? So how then do you know none of us knows anything? You know the rest. This is called the “reductio ad absurdum” argument and it is used all the time to discredit flawed
Individualists are often charged with neglecting the community. This is a variant of the charge that if you strive for profit, you are neglecting the useful or if you aim for the private interest, the public interest must not be of any concern to you. The charge, however, is spurious and certainly unproven, except in a perverse sense. That sense
Professor James Beck of Columbia University was steamed, at least back in 1995, when he expressed his dismay to “60 Minutes” about efforts to restore Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Today the job is completed and there are still folks who share Professor Beck’s outlook. What is at issue? I am no art historian, let alone an expert at art
With Hillary Clinton’s decision to explore a possible run for the Senate seat vacated in New York State by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the political landscape appears to be gaining a clarity it hasn’t had since the arrival of Bill Clinton in the White House. Bill Clinton has been the kind of politician folks refer to as a centrist, meaning by this
When the government in a free society interacts with the citizenry, no bias is supposed to occur. That is the gist of the rule of law. The law is to apply to everyone in the same way. In the same spirit, Public Broadcasting, which is partly financed by the government, is often urged to be fair-minded, unbiased in the way it deals with various
When Hillary Clinton explained her husband’s philandering was probably due to the fact that “he was scarred by abuse,” specifically by “the terrible conflict between his mother and grandmother,” she gave voice to a very widespread trend of thinking in our era. This is that when we engage in misconduct, we do so because certain facts in our history
Over the years of watching the democratic process I’ve noticed something important. People tend to reject democracy, indeed, fight it tooth and nail, when it doesn’t go their way. But when it does, well, it is the tops. Consider Proposition 187, which cut off welfare to illegal immigrants. Governor Gray Davis of California is now maneuvering to
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.