The 20th century was a time when the world sang the praises of despots and despotism. The more wars government leaders fought, the more they centralized their control, the more they hobbled the economy, the more liberty they stole, the more they cut off trade and exchange with other nations, the more their gain was our liberty lost, the more these very government leaders have been celebrated by historians and pundits of all stripes.
The US Supreme Court’s 9-0 decision overturning the obstruction of justice verdict against Arthur Andersen Company comes too late to save the firm or the jobs of thousands of employees who found themselves out of work when the government destroyed the firm three years ago.
A law of democratic government is that any group that gains power becomes part of the problem, not the solution. Republicans are the classic case. They are elected to cut government and then race each other to outdo their opponents in expanding it, while all promises to the contrary are forgotten or redefined.
Where the state is, there is the power to tax; for rulers cannot rule without taxation. As Ludwig von Mises wrote: “The funds that a government spends for whatever purposes are levied by taxation.” Or as Murray Rothbard put it: “All state actions rest on the fundamental binary intervention of taxes.”
The term “hedonics” is derived from ancient Greek and means “pleasure doctrine.” It is also the doctrine which the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) applies when calculating the price indices and for the computation of the real gross domestic product and of productivity.
If you are like me, you love Austrian economics—the logic, the rigor, the explanatory power. But we all know that this is not the usual approach to economics taken at the university level. If you can’t attend the Mises University, where can you go to study the subject systematically? Over the summer, I worked with the staff at the Mises Institute to find an answer to this problem.
[Originally written as an introduction to For A New Liberty]
Those of us who appreciate liberty, voluntary exchange, and workers’ property rights to their own labor have long objected to the American organized labor movement. Since the 1930s, this movement has been defined by the AFL-CIO.
The Mises Institute has worked for more than two decades to advance one purpose: the cause of economic freedom in academia and public life. The two comments on our work that I hear most often are: (1) you guys are doing a great job, and (2) it is not working.
Katrina gave the Gulf region of the United States a lesson in government failure, and how. In the weeks following the hurricane, it became clear that most of the destruction was not the work of Mother Nature but those who are charged with preventing precisely such disasters as this.
