A State of Ignorance Mises Review 11, No. 4 (Winter 2005) RESURGENCE OF THE WARFARE STATE: THE CRISIS SINCE 9/11 Robert Higgs The Independent Institute, 2005, xv + 252 pgs. Robert Higgs has a well-deserved reputation as an eminent economic historian, but in this collection of essays and interviews, he shows himself an adept moral philosopher as
Mises Review 11, No. 4 (Winter 2005) THE LEGALIZATION OF DRUGS Douglas Husak and Peter de Marneffe Cambridge University Press, 2005, xiv + 204 pgs. This book is part of the valuable series For And Against, in which two philosophers debate public policy issues. Husak argues that the possession and use of so-called dangerous drugs such as heroin and
The Free Market 26, no. 3 (March 2005) In the ten years between 1994 and 2004, a dramatic turn took place within the Republican Party. The themes of the 1994 election weren’t just about cutting government, though that was the central campaign promise of that generation of elected officials sent to Washington. The core was more revolutionary than
Let’s see here . The police were helping in the post-flood looting, and now the police are grabbing guns from homeowners who are trying to protect themselves. Says the NYT: “no civilians in New Orleans will be allowed to carry pistols, shotguns, or other firearms of any kind.” The police super says: “Only law enforcement are allowed to have
A woman was fined for holding an apple while performing a maneuver in a car. Aside from the absurdity of this, it cost the government far more to prosecute her than what they obtained from the fine: A NURSERY nurse was fined £60 yesterday for holding an apple in her hand while driving around a bend after police used a spotter aircraft, a
In their recently published paper, “The Curley Effect: The Economics of Shaping the Electorate” (Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Vol. 21(1), April 2005, pp. 1-19), Harvard economists Glaeser and Shleifer argue that democratic leaders can mix incendiary rhetoric and the redistributive powers of the state to encourage political
Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years is a fascinating and quite readable speculation on the relationship between geography and history. He has assembled a cornucopia of interesting facts and plausible insights concerning the course of events over the last 13,000 years. The result is
On two separate occasions in the last couple of weeks, people have asked me a familiar question: “In a system of ‘anarcho-capitalism’ or the free-market order, wouldn’t society degenerate into constant battles between private warlords?” Unfortunately I didn’t give adequate answers at the times, but I hope in this article to prove the adage that
In a recent article , I discussed the possibility of private, competing security agencies. I took for granted the background rule of law (or lack thereof), and merely made the relative argument that a monopoly institution of violence (i.e. the State) would not aid the achievement of a working consensus on legal norms, and that in fact (as history
I was invited to speak at a peace march and rally in Birmingham, Alabama, sponsored by the Alabama Peace and Justice Coalition , and gladly accepted the offer to speak against the war in Iraq. Yes, as you might guess, the program was dominated by leftists who rightly oppose the war but want big government to run the economy. I accepted for the
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.