Former National Football League star Walter Payton has been stricken by a rare liver disease and needs a transplant in order to live. Unfortunately, the demand for available organs far outstrips the supply, and several thousand Americans this year will die waiting for those life-saving organs. When Congress passed the National Organ Transplant Act
The FCC is a chronic meddler in the affairs of the communications industry. What Cervantes wrote could aptly be used to describe this agency and its supporters in that they have “an oar in every man’s boat and a finger in every pie.” The latest fingers are directed at MCI WorldCom and Sprint in their attempts to join together in what would be the
*Presentation prepared for the Mises Institute’s conference, “Austrian Economics and the Financial Markets,” Toronto, Canada, September 16-17, 1999. In 1978 Michael Jensen and William Meckling, writing in the Financial Analysts Journal , offered an extraordinarily gloomy prediction for the future of capitalism: “The most spectacular period of
Investors Business Daily April 1, 1999 Is This How Tariffs Should Work? Protectionists share a faith that says tariffs protect American workers. If they would only look at the U.S. suit-making business, they could see the ruinous effects of this line of thinking. In the last decade, the domestic tailored- clothing industry lost nearly half its
Investors Business Daily April 27, 1999 The Internet’s Privacy Hounds Thus far the Internet has been flying fast and high with little regulation. It hasn’t been grounded by taxes, nor has it been shackled by government interference. But this happy state of affairs may not last. Lawmakers have apparently reached the limits of their self-control.
A year ago July, I sent my girlfriend some flowers. I picked up the phone, called a florist, and, for about thirty dollars, she received one dozen roses. Seven months later, for Valentine’s Day, I called the same florist and again ordered one dozen roses for my girlfriend. This time, however, they would cost one hundred twenty dollars. I was
[From Money Magazine , August 1999] In her superb new biography of J.P. Morgan , Jean Strouse quotes a few lines written by the historian Henry Adams in 1902: “Pierpont Morgan...is carrying loads that stagger the strongest nerves. Everyone asks what would happen if some morning he woke up dead.” Almost a century later, the men and women at the top
Watching the national debate about what to do or not do about Social Security (SS), it is tempting to think the worst about our fellow citizens and the people who represent them in Washington. The debate suggests that most people have no idea what SS is, how the program figures in Washington’s finances, or how SS comes to shuffle around hundreds
From Investors Business Daily February 16, 1999 By launching a multibillon-dollar ‘’livability agenda’’ in its fiscal year 2000 budget, the White House has catapulted a six-letter word from local zoning meetings to the national political stage: sprawl. For most people, sprawl means suburban development that’s gone too far. Lots of folks aren’t
It seems everyone in D.C. claims to believe in “free trade,” but the meaning of the phrase is being drained out through sheer political hypocrisy. A true free trader is not a supporter of export subsidies and bailouts, foreign aid and mercantilist trade treaties, centralized executive power or global environmental regulations. Simply put, a free
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.