Every time I take off my shoes in the security screening process at the airport, I find it consoling to remind myself that at least Richard Reid wasn’t wearing an underwear bomb. We take off our shoes because Reid, a delusional British malcontent, was caught trying to light an explosive device in his shoes on a Paris-to-Miami flight a few days
See this BBC “ Photo Journal “ on the San Pedro Prison in La Paz, where there are no guards or metal bars on cell windows. Inmates, who can live wih their children, have to pay for their cells with money earned from jobs in the prison economy. Some sell groceries, work in food stalls, hotels, or restaurants, while others work as hairdressers,
You go to the supermarket and stock up a week’s groceries. Steak and roast and chicken and fruits and vegetables. You love those Del Monte canned plums, so you grab a couple of cans of them, too. The can says plums. Therefore, you trust plums, not pickled oriental eggs are in the opaque tin can. You get to the checkout counter and an absolute
What if they don’t want a government? Must one be imposed? These are my questions to news reports that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw made a surprise trip to Baghdad in a desperate effort to jumpstart stalled efforts to form an Iraqi government. The lack of a governing coalition in Iraq was simply
Ludwig von Mises argued that ballots are to be preferred to bullets because while they bring about similar outcomes, the former has less bloodshed than the latter. Murray Rothbard (Mises’s student) criticized this conclusion (which Mises shared, after all, with David Hume), because, he argued, democratic rule promotes political arrangements — not
So I am getting a ride home from daily Mass, and my friend and driver, a history professor at my school, is angry at British Petroleum’s latest announcement that a major oil field is being shutdown. This was news to me because I hadn’t checked any of the news sites that day, although I must admit that following Mass, such events are furthest from
We are sitting around a dinner table following a mammoth St. Martin’s Day feast—myself and three other professors, and our wives, and my ten-year-old who never liked the kids’ table anyway—when one professor is asked about his upcoming conference trip to Oxford. The conference topic is diversity. So in the interest of small talk, and of genuine
There seems to be two popular paths to wealth in the private sector today. The first is tried and true method: you try to anticipate consumers’ needs, and then risk your capital trying to satisfy them. Successful entrepreneurs anticipate and satisfy correctly, while the unsuccessful ones don’t. The second is more nefarious. With this method, you
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.