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.
In the first line of his book, Planning for Freedom, Ludwig von Mises, the famed Austrian economist, observed “Planning is socialism.” I will admit that my first acquaintance with government planners was a planning class in my Master’s program, where I was given the party line about how important it was to plan for growth.
The Free Market 26, no. 10 (October 2005)
The fifteenth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, signed into law by President Bush I on July 26, 1990, has come and gone, but it has not been a success. It has cost untold billions, increased the pestilence of labor disputes, and even increased the ranks of the unemployed among the disabled population (because it made them more expensive to hire).
