Mises Daily

Following his first airline trip since the September 11 attacks, Mark Thornton gives his account of the federal government's attempts to regulate and regiment airport and airplane security.

Economists of the Austrian School not only understood that markets can fail if measured by an unrealistic and unrealizable standard. Ludwig von Mises emphasized the "uncertainty inherent in every action."

Life is uncertain, no matter how it is lived. The idea that the political process, which is one of the most volatile things on the face of the earth, is the basis for certainty and stability simply ignores reality. A Nobel Prize cannot change that fact.

One day in 1953, an employee of the United States Bureau of Engraving and Printing with a distinguished ten-year employment record and a wife and two young sons, decided to become a thief. And working at the Bureau for the government showed him how he could do it.

"Socialism" and "think tank" are mutually exclusive-even contradictory. Socialism does, however, produce lots of tanks: tanks to suppress people who actually do think. 

When we talk about demand for money, what we really mean is the demand for money's purchasing power. After all, people don't want a greater amount of money in their pockets; they want greater purchasing power in their possession.

What the Misesians have done in Guatemala is create an intellectual infrastructure that promotes a hard-core attachment to freedom among the business class, which dovetails very nicely with the working classes' instinctive opposition to taxes.

Either the U.S. should reclaim its traditional policy of free trade and peace and thereby end its international military interventions, or it should wage unrelenting war against any group or government that resents and predictably responds to U.S. policy.

It would be the supreme irony if, in Greenspan's eager rush to bail out his constituents at the first whiff of every trouble from Y2k to WTC, all he and his myrmidons on the lower slopes of Olympus have accomplished is to topple the very banks they are there to protect. 

We should never tire in our mission to point out that there is an alternative to the Politically Correct Left and the Militarized Right: that there is freedom itself, the genuine article, and a tradition of thought in defense of freedom unmatched by any other in its rigor and dedication.