The Free Market 16, no. 3 (March 1998) President Bill Clinton called on nine opponents of affirmative action during his manipulative “national dialogue on race,” and asked a reasonable question. “What do you think we should do?” The right answer is nothing. Do nothing at all. To achieve that ideal, government must get out and stay out of the
The Free Market 17, no. 8 (August 1999) When Janet Yellen, Clinton’s chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, resigned her post, she said it was for purely personal reasons. But according to inside reports, the personal reasons included frustration at having to lie day-in and day-out. No matter what the economic data of the week, she was
The Free Market 25, no. 7 (July/August 2007) The world went bonkers for about ten years way back when. The stock market crashed in 1929, and with it fell the last remnants of the old liberal ideology that government should leave society and economy alone to flourish. After the Great Depression hit, there was a general air in the United States
The Free Market 28, no. 10 (July 2010) USA Today offered a roundup of how the great recession has affected American life. The trends are gleaned from US Census data, which provide a look at how economic downturns can devastate a society, and offer a glimpse into a theme that the Austrian tradition has long emphasized. Economics isn’t just about
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 23, no. 10 (October 2003) H ow well I recall the debates about the WTO and Nafta , both of which the Mises Institute editorialized against on grounds that they constituted managed trade, not free trade. In the case of Nafta , it was outright regional protectionism. But for dissenting from both sides of the phony DC debate, we
The Free Market 24, no. ( 2004) Critics accuse libertarians of reveling in government failures. Yes and No. No one is pleased to see the destruction caused by government policies, whether small scale, as when a tighter regulation causes business failures, or large scale, as when wars destroy life for millions. The kernel of truth to the claim is
The Free Market 24, no. 3 (March 2004) A common accusation against the Mises Institute is that it is obsessed with tracing social and economic problems to the state, and, in doing so, it oversimplifies the world. The state is not all bad, people say, and some of its actions yield positive results. It is not inconceivable, they say, that the
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
The Free Market 26, no. 3 (March 2005) In the ten years between 1994 and 2004, a dramatic turn took place within the Republican Party. The themes of the 1994 election weren’t just about cutting government, though that was the central campaign promise of that generation of elected officials sent to Washington. The core was more revolutionary than
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.