With Hillary Clinton’s decision to explore a possible run for the Senate seat vacated in New York State by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the political landscape appears to be gaining a clarity it hasn’t had since the arrival of Bill Clinton in the White House. Bill Clinton has been the kind of politician folks refer to as a centrist, meaning by this
When the government in a free society interacts with the citizenry, no bias is supposed to occur. That is the gist of the rule of law. The law is to apply to everyone in the same way. In the same spirit, Public Broadcasting, which is partly financed by the government, is often urged to be fair-minded, unbiased in the way it deals with various
When Hillary Clinton explained her husband’s philandering was probably due to the fact that “he was scarred by abuse,” specifically by “the terrible conflict between his mother and grandmother,” she gave voice to a very widespread trend of thinking in our era. This is that when we engage in misconduct, we do so because certain facts in our history
Over the years of watching the democratic process I’ve noticed something important. People tend to reject democracy, indeed, fight it tooth and nail, when it doesn’t go their way. But when it does, well, it is the tops. Consider Proposition 187, which cut off welfare to illegal immigrants. Governor Gray Davis of California is now maneuvering to
Sparks flew on the United States Senate floor on Thursday and Friday, October 14 and 15, when Senators from Kentucky, Utah, and Washington took umbrage at Senator John McCain’s allegations of corruption supposedly directly tied to the policy of soft money contributions to senatorial campaigns. Senator McCain had a tough time dodging his three
Back on November 9, 1989 I lived in Auburn, Alabama. On that morning I looked at the front page of my daily paper and to my amazement a cut out map was shown on the front page with the name “Nickelsdorf” in big letters above a dot indicating a little town in Austria, about 7 miles from the Hungarian border. I was amazed because in 1953, in
Socialism was shown back in 1922, in Ludwig von Mises’ book by that name, to be an impossible economic system. Von Mises demonstrated that a planned economy cannot allocate resources effectively, so that those who need things and those who can produce them are properly linked up to communicate with one another. Only in a free market is this
The Free Market 17, no. 7 (July 1999) Free markets may be productive, a common complaint runs, but they lead to unjust results. For instance, writing in The New Republic (March 29, 1999) Cass R. Sunstein of the University of Chicago School of Law closes a book review this way: A familiar problem with unrestricted free markets is that they can
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.