The Free Market 28, no. 12 (December 2010) The essential features of the boom-bust business cycle can be understood by viewing them in terms of the financial circumstances of a single individual. Thus, imagine that an ordinary person has been going about his life more or less living within his means. And now, one day, he receives a registered
The Free Market 21, no. 4 (April 2003) The New York Times recently ran a three-part series on a string of tragic industrial accidents at facilities owned by McWane Inc., a large producer of sewer and water pipe based in Alabama. The series describes nine apparently needless and sometimes especially gruesome deaths, as well as several horrendous
The Free Market 26, no. 5 (May 2005) C onsiderable public discussion and debate now rages over Social Security and how to reform it. As the system currently stands, as early as 2018, it will be necessary to finance a growing portion of its outlays to retirees by means of outside sources of funds, since at that point the sums paid into the system
The Free Market 24, no. 5 (May 2006) The question that no one seems to be asking is: where would General Motors be without the government-backed unions that have come to dominate its management? The answer, of course, applies to Ford and Chrysler, as well as to General Motors. I’ve singled out General Motors because it’s still the largest of the
The Free Market 19, no. 3 (March 2001) The state of California has experienced a meltdown in its electric power system. For months, the system has repeatedly run at or near the overload point, necessitating brownouts and even rolling blackouts. Incredibly, the fiasco has been blamed on deregulation and the free market. Economist Paul Krugman,
The Free Market 20, no. 1 (January 2002) With the Microsoft antitrust suit near a final settlement, it is a good time to take an entirely new direction in antitrust. That new direction ought to be its complete elimination. Its underlying concepts in economics and political philosophy need to be thoroughly discredited, and the legislation on
The Free Market 32, no. 6 (June 2014) Many Americans, perhaps a substantial majority, still believe that, irrespective of any problems they may have caused, labor unions are fundamentally an institution that exists in the vital self-interest of wage earners. Indeed, many believe that it is labor unions that stand between the average wage earner
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.