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,
It’s obvious Iraq doesn’t want war and the Bush administration does. The administration claims war would be a preemptive strike, but more honest commentators freely admit, as does Thomas Friedman of the New York Times , that oil plays a huge role in the continuing drama, even the decisive role. “Any war we launch in Iraq will certainly be—in
The National Bureau of Economic Research dates the peak of the last business cycle at March 2001, and has yet to call a trough, which is to say it hasn’t yet observed an end to the contraction or the beginnings of an economic recovery. The number of months we have traveled from the end of the last peak to the current day is 24. The NBER has used
The Austrian economists tell us that a price is more than a price. It is an objective expression of subjective judgments concerning human wants, now and in the future. It conveys information to us about how we ought to conduct ourselves: where capital should be directed, how much of what should be consumed now or later, which jobs to take and
Explaining why the opening blows in the War on Iraq did not go as planned, General William Wallace offered this revealing, damning, and now-famous comment: “The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different from the one we had war-gamed against.” The remark “ignited the ire of the White House,” the Washington Post reports. Why? Wallace broke the
Public and social authority having collapsed in Iraq, property was suddenly unprotected and available for the taking. Swept up in the euphoria of the moment, everything in sight was seized. I speak not of the mobs in Basra that stripped clean the Sheraton Hotel as the U.S. military looked tolerantly on, or the masses in Baghdad who ran away
When Bush announced the end of fighting in Iraq, he also threw the first pitch in the great American sport of telling a foreign country, about which we know nothing, how to restructure itself to our liking. The preferred model, of course, is the United States, or, rather, the part of the United States that particularly appeals to the would-be
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.