For lack of a better term I am dubbing it Woods’s Law: whenever the private sector introduces an innovation that makes the poor better off than they would have been without it, or that offers benefits or terms that no one else is prepared to offer them, someone—in the name of helping the poor—will call for curbing or abolishing it.
Most school kids are left with the impression that the US Constitution was the inevitable followup to the Declaration of Independence and the war with King George. What they miss out on is the exciting debate that took place after the war and before the Constitution, a debate that concerned the dangers of creating a federal government at all.
Entrepreneurs are in a danger zone when their activities are incomprehensible to the general public. People begin to regard unexplained profits as suspicious, and the entrepreneur encounters public hostility. Entrepreneurs who assemble physical objects may find their activities transparent enough to avoid the torch-bearing mob, but beware of those who make a buck off information.
Adapted from the foreword to Principles of Economics, published by the Mises Institute (2007).
I was born on the lower East Side of New York and brought up on the lower West Side. (I bring in these facts as introduction to some ideas that may be of general interest, not as autobiography.) Of my earliest experiences I remember practically nothing.
Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean of the Austrian School. This article, which appeared in National Review in 1959, is the introduction to the new Mises Institute edition of Hazlitt’s Failure of the “New Economics.“
After the shooting rampage at Virginia Tech, many well-intentioned people all over the country have been calling for increased gun control laws. However, economists tend to oppose gun control laws, since such laws generally pay no attention to basic economic issues.
In response to mounting controversy over the student loan industry, the House passed the Student Loan Sunshine Act by a large margin (414–3). The Act would require lenders to disclose any financial relationships they have with educational institutions, and it would prohibit certain questionable activities, such as lenders giving “gifts” to the employees in a school’s financial aid office.
