The Free Market 16, no. 4 (April 1998) Medical researchers are often so convinced of the overriding social importance of their work that they won’t let something as petty as market valuations get in the way of their agenda. That’s why they haven’t missed many opportunities at securing tax-funded grants and subsidies, and they’re about to score
The Free Market 17, no. 11 (November 1999) Even when the market produces amazing new technology, it can become a basis for criticism. There are two main excuses used today to justify intervention in the technology market. The first argues that manufacturers build a planned obsolescence into their designs. The second argues that a path dependency
The Free Market 19, no. 3 (March 2001) Due to the weakening economy, the red-hot job market appears to be at an end. Employers are already handing out pink slips, giving rise to complaints about the “injustices” of the market system, particularly among younger workers whose careers have been furthered by an unusually long economic boom. Few
The Free Market 20, no. 3 (March 2002) My first “real job,” the summer before my senior year in high school, was selling shoes in a small retail store in my hometown. The job paid only what was then the federal minimum wage, $3.35 an hour, but, then, my labor was probably barely worth that. At least the work was honest and productive. The
Entrepreneurs are in a danger zone when their activities are incomprehensible to the general public. Profits that appear without obvious explanation are suspect, and the entrepreneur is likely to find public hostility accompanying the suspicion. Entrepreneurs who assemble physical objects may find their activities transparent enough to avoid the
The final flight of the space-shuttle program, in progress as this is written, has prompted a number of retrospectives on the program’s costs and benefits. Saturday’s Wall Street Journal reported that the price tag on the US space-shuttle program has been difficult to pin down. One NASA estimate — on the low end, because it does not account for
[Lewis D. Solomon: The Privatization of Space Exploration: Business, Technology, Law, and Policy . New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008, ISBN: 978-1-4128-0759-3, 128 pages. This review originally appeared in Libertarian Papers , 4.1 (2012).] Lewis D. Solomon’s book The Privatization of Space Exploration , now available in a 2012
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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.
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