The Free Market 14, no. 1 (January 1996) Stuff those corks back in the champagne bottles. The Republican leadership in Congress can’t celebrate the New Year until it breaks silence on the Mexican bailout. This is a debacle that makes subsidies for midnight basketball seem sensible. With the Mexican precedent, who knows what 1996 will bring? Is
The Free Market 15, no. 8 (August 1997) The Clinton administration has targeted a new batch of global enemies. It wants to crush them with the usual mix of negotiation, treaty, and enforcement through spying, fines, and propaganda. It’s all in a day’s work for the “world’s indispensable nation”—the administration’s new name for itself. Oddly,
The Free Market 15, no. 10 (October 1997) Free trade and peace go together; protectionism is the handmaiden of war. These were key teachings of the early classical economists, as well as the Austrians. Consistent libertarians have never doubted it. But recently the theory has come under fire from all sides—and led to dangerous coalitions pushing
The Free Market 16, no. 2 (February 1998) The conventional wisdom on the defeat of Fast Track trade legislation is dead wrong. As the press would have it, the failure of Fast Track reflects the rise of grass-roots protectionism. The vote in Congress to deny Clinton the authority to negotiate trade deals is a response to constituent pressure.
The Free Market 17, no. 6 (June 1999) After the US government attacked Yugoslavia, the first act of the Republicans was to take tax cuts off the table (if they were ever really on it). This symbolic gesture underscores a point: when a war is on, the work of liberty is off. For this reason, everyone concerned about freedom must oppose war. At the
The Free Market 17, no. 7 (July 1999) On the wall outside my office, the gift of Nelson White, is a framed piece of money: a 500 billion dinar note issued by the government of Yugoslavia. It was printed in 1993, when it would buy about a gallon of milk. And that was before the inflation really got bad. By January 1994, the rate would reach 313
The Free Market 21, no. 1 (January 2003) Many of the same people who debunked Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, and ridiculed its failures, are enthusiastically backing George W. Bush’s War on Terror. Both are big-government programs. Why back one and not the other? Left-liberals say that the job of the state is to bring about fairness and
The Free Market 21, no. 6 (June 2003) “The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different from the one we had war-gamed against,” said General William Wallace after the first week of fighting in Iraq had not gone as planned. The comment speaks to a truth of which we are reminded in wartime: the military is a government operation that undertakes its
The Free Market 23, no. 7 (July 2003) The extent to which we are secure in our homes, property, and the places we shop is due in large part to the commercial marketplace. It is the free market that makes available alarm systems, locks, fences, cameras, security services, and in purchasing these items we are free to make a choice among
The Free Market 23, no. 11 (November 2003) When they have the resources and political support, would-be central planners like to take their show on the road, always with the same results: huge promises followed by big disasters. Thus is there no reason to be shocked or surprised at the enormous mess the US has created in Iraq. With bombings,
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.