Mt. Rushmore is famous because 60 years ago, someone carved the faces of four dead presidents into its lofty Harney Peak granite cliffs. The mountain itself is located in the Black Hills, a somewhat obscure mountain range in western South Dakota and eastern Wyoming that resembles the Southern Appalachians, which are located a couple of miles from
While journalists and political junkies eagerly await and discuss each of Bush’s choices to serve in the cabinet, the real issue is not even on the radar screen. What about the declared purpose of the departments themselves? Each was establish for the purpose of intervening in the rights and liberties of Americans. The machinery of the
When a presidential nominee is shot down for a post in government, the person’s first reaction is sadness and regret. But a person like Linda Chavez should look on the bright side. As an opponent of much of the policies of the Department of Labor, she won’t have to face four years of relentless frustration and anger that comes with attempting to
White House insiders have said for years that Bill Clinton has been desperately seeking a legacy for his administration – other than having been impeached and having disgraced himself and his office. At long last, he has at least two of them. The first of these is the coming recession, his first gift to the incoming administration of George W.
As the stock markets continue to fall and economic indicators point toward a recession, Democratic politicians are reviving charges that President George W. Bush has been “talking down” the economy. My first reaction to such charges, other than to dismiss them as nonsense, is to wonder whether or not politicians ought to be accusing their rivals
Although I am hardly a television junkie, I am quite aware of the grand success enjoyed by the new NBC Wednesday-night drama, “The West Wing.” At the recent Emmys, it received more awards than any other drama, and it apparently has a huge and faithful following. The star of the show is Martin Sheen, who plays President Josiah Bartlett, a left-wing
It is Sunday morning, and the socialist train on which I ride (better known as Amtrak) is slowly moving through Washington, D.C. Out the left window, I see the Capitol, and right at that instant, we descend into a tunnel that is pitch black. Surely this is a prophetic moment. In a few minutes, the train stops at the Union Station, where I
As the once-formidable Enron Empire continues to implode--and new revelations appear daily about the inner workings (and apparent financial shenanigans) of this firm--we are treated, not surprisingly, to the wrong story by the mainstream news media and their associates from the political classes. It is bad enough to see a huge firm go bankrupt,
It is sometimes exciting when one’s home county makes national or even international news, but the place where I lived off and on for 30 years seems to be the center of attention that perhaps people in that county would like to avoid. For the past two weeks, a horror story has unfolded in Walker County, Georgia, as state inspectors have
The “leftist slant” of the mainstream news media in the United States tends to be in the eye of the beholder. For example, when former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg claimed in his recent book Bias that mainstream news figures such as Dan Rather and others demonstrated outward leftist sentiments, the attacks upon him by his former colleagues
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.