The U.S. Congress is holding hearings on why gasoline prices have risen; pundits are beginning to repeat the anti-capitalist oil company bashing of the 1970s; and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently issued a report blaming prosperity for rising housing prices and self-servingly calling for more HUD subsidies for
Appearing on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, July 30, Republican vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney endorsed the Clinton/Gore administration’s policy of energy socialism, only criticizing it as being insufficiently coercive and forceful. “We need a national energy policy,” said Cheney, apparently oblivious to the disastrous results of America’s
Gasoline prices are zooming (45% over last year) and drivers are worried that this may affect their summer vacation plans, while truckers marched on Washington D.C. protesting high diesel costs. Pursuing votes, presidential candidates are scrambling to provide political solutions for the doubling of heating oil prices in New Hampshire in the last
One of the more remarkable economic events of the year thus far was the response by economists to Vice-President Gore’s claim that “Big Oil,” that collusive, price-gouging maker of “enormous and unreasonable profits,” is responsible for rising gas prices. Gore’s claim got economists buzzing about like hornets whose nest had just been swatted. They
The Free Market 18, no. 1 (January 2000) Jean-Claude Castex is surrounded by miracles, or at least the quest for miracles. As the official feutier, or tender of religious candles, at Lourdes, the spot in France where the Virgin Mary appeared in a grotto to a poor miller’s daughter in the nineteenth century, Castex sees, on average, some 14,000
The Free Market 18, no. 5 (May 2000) Americans are concerned about the rising cost of pharmaceutical drugs. This has drawn the attention of writers, politicians, and others who have attempted to deal with the issue in typical fashion by advocating the use of government force to implement their plan. Kathleen Day, a media fellow at the Kaiser
The Free Market 18, no. 5 (May 2000) University students are going berserk again. No, they are not swallowing goldfish, going on panty raids or stuffing themselves into phone booths, the excesses of a bygone day (the first two are now politically incorrect, and what with modern technology there is nary a phone booth to be found). Nor are they
The Free Market 18, no. 9 (September 2000) The economic ignorance of politicians and bureaucrats never surprises me, and the recent events concerning rising oil prices are no different. Recently Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) accused the oil industry of “gouging” the public stating “It’s an increase directly attributable to profit-taking by the
The state of California is experiencing a fiasco in its electric power system. The system has repeatedly run near the overload point, necessitating brownouts and threatening rolling blackouts. Wholesale power prices in San Diego County and the southern portion of adjacent Orange County have briefly been as high as $5,000 per megawatt hour and,
A staple of any Principles of Macroeconomics class is a review of the economic situation of the 1970s. That decade, from my perspective, began when President Nixon closed the gold window to remove the last constraint to the political class’ desire to fund the Great Society and the Vietnam War. From that event, the decade digressed through
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.