The Free Market 24, no. 1 (January 2004) The “Coalition Provisional Authority” (the US government) in Iraq has instituted a 15 percent tax in Iraq based on the view that “these collections are for the benefit of the Iraqi people.” The US will tax income, the transfer of “real property,” car sales, and gasoline. The US claims that this is a lower
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. 4 (April 2004) This dreadful election season will spew forth many promises by politicians to “lead us into the future.” I can hardly think of a worse fate for any society than to be led into the future by the political class of gangsters, marauders, looters, and liars. Fortunately, they haven’t the capacity to lead whole
The Free Market 24, no. 5 (May 2004) I am often asked about career paths for freedom lovers. How can one combine professional life with the advancement of liberty? Let’s admit at the outset that it is presumptuous to offer any answer since all jobs and careers in the market economy are subject to the forces of the division of labor. Because a
The Free Market 24, no. 8 (August 2004) At our conferences and programs, the students who attend are the first to have been educated in the age of information. Nearly all the students now attending were born on or after the year of our founding (1982). The Mises Institute went online in 1995, about the time that web browsers were becoming more
The Free Market 24, no. 9 (September 2004) In a growing economy with sound money, the purchasing power of your money should and would be always on the rise. Your dollar would buy more this year than last year, not only in terms of quality improvements but also in terms of price. This is another way of saying that prices would constantly fall for
The Free Market 24, no. 10 (October 2004) Just about everyone you talk to these days admits serious dissatisfaction with the election choices this year. And yet most people will eventually decide for the “lesser of two evils”—whatever that is, and there is probably no way to know in advance—realizing that no real viable option is going to
The Free Market 24, no. 11 (November 2004) The newest political cliché offered up by the Republicans speaks of the need for an “Ownership Society.” To those of us who support private property, it might sound good at first. But let us think about this before embracing it. If you see what the pundits are saying, you find that, like the term
The Free Market 24, no. 12 (December 2004) H ans F. Sennholz, winner of the 2004 Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Liberty, is one of the handful of economists who dared defend free markets and sound money during the dark years before the Misesian revival. He did so with eloquence, precision, and brilliance. He has never tired
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.