The Free Market 32, No. 1 (January 2014) Although not related in quite the heroic terms it once was, the transcontinental railroads retain their place as one of the great alleged success stories of nineteenth-century America. According to the popular myths, the railroads, these great monuments to the ingenuity of American industrialists, united
The Free Market 13, no. 12 (December 1995) Halloween has a socialist tenor. Menacing figures arrive at your door uninvited, demand your property, and threaten to perform an unspecified “trick” if you don’t fork over. That’s the way the government works in a nutshell. Thanksgiving has been reinterpreted as the white man, after burning, raping,
The Free Market 13, no. 12 (December 1995) As Victorian England produced the classic Christmas literary work, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol , 20th-century America has made its distinctive contribution: the Christmas movie. Unfortunately, this genre has continued Dickens’s contrast of the Christmas spirit with the bottom-line heartlessness of
The Free Market 14, no. 5 (May 1996) The dialectic goes like this. First, an artist—I use the term broadly—exhibits something pornographic, blasphemous, or otherwise egregiously offensive. His opus may well be an action, as when an HIV-positive “performance artist” had his back cut open before a surprised audience in Minneapolis. Next, the
The Free Market 14, no. 9 (September 1996) In a state-funded education system, bad ideas live longer than they would in a free market. That’s the best explanation for the staying power of the two opposing errors of our time: nihilism and pseudo-omniscience in the social sciences. Nihilism comes in the form of postmodernism, a pretentious body of
The Free Market 16, no. 3 (March 1998) A Jewish Batman? A female Robin? The Dynamic Duo battling on behalf of truth, justice, and Austrian economics? Are we in a parallel universe or what? We are indeed if we are reading The Batman Chronicles , the Winter 1998 issue, devoted to “Elseworlds,” in which “heroes are taken from their usual settings
The Free Market 16, no. 4 (April 1998) The Clinton administration, applying its theory that all good things should be subsidized with tax dollars, proposes new spending to upgrade the Internet. But it’s not the government that has turned this medium into the most promising venue for free-market exchange in our time. It’s the astounding power of
The Free Market 16, no. 8 (August 1998) How is capitalism being treated in American popular culture today? The signals are mixed, but generally the picture is bleak. Hollywood continues its unrelenting assault on the commercial society that is its own lifeblood. The latest filmmaker to criticize capitalism all the way to the bank is James
The Free Market 16, no. 10 (October 1998) The world has just finished what, for Americans, is the curious spectacle of the Soccer World Cup. Every four years since the 1930s teams representing 32 countries have met (in a different venue each time) to decide who is best. Much of Europe, South America, and Africa come to a halt during the three
The Free Market 18, no. 3 (March 2000) Statism has so permeated our culture that even the games we play reflect the popular belief in omnipotent government. For example, one of the most successful computer games of all time is the SimCity series, which requires the player to plan a city in exhaustive detail from uninhabited terrain. Over five
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.