The Republic Becomes the Empire
We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night.
The Economic Comeback of Germany
The “miracle” of Germany’s revival was not the result of a conscious rejection of socialism, but was rather an accident of political and social conditions. Germans meant by freedom the freedom to impose their own controls.
The Welfare State and the Promise of Protection
[An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Floy Lilley, is available for download.]
The 19th-Century Bernanke
Nicholas Biddle was the president of the American central bank that preceded the Fed. When his bureaucratic cradle was rocked, he quickly morphed into a Machiavellian monster.
Why Airwaves (Electromagnetic Spectra) Are (Arguably) Property
The issue of private property rights in the EM spectrum (airwaves) arises occasionally. To my knowledge there is not much systematic work on this topic; the David Kelley & Roger Donway‘s 1985 monograph Laissez Parler: Freedom in the Electronic Media remains the best work on this, to my knowledge; and see also the Rothbard quotes appended below.
It turns out that Government Worked Directly With Goldman
It’s hard to know whether to be outraged or yawn at the revelations that Henry Paulson with Bush’s Treasury talked constantly on the phone with the head of Goldman Sachs, probably in violation of every ethics rule on the books, during those bailout days. These rules are made to somehow clean up government and establish a ridiculously naive ideal that government can and must be constantly impartial in the pursuit of scientific public policy.
The Fallacy of Intellectual Property
Intellectual property is necessarily a statist doctrine. As long as people believe that they have a right that requires a huge concentration of power to enforce, they will be most eager to rely on the state to protect it.
Replies to Readers of My Article on the Real Right to Medical Care
From a reader in Cambridge, ON, Canada:
RE:The Real Right To Medical Care….
Software Models and Austrian Economics
My day job is software development. Within the field there is a considerable literature on modeling, which means more or less, identifying and organizing the concepts in your problem domain into a form that is suitable for writing programs.
While reading the book Model-Driven Design Using Business Patterns by Pavel Hruby, I was struck by some similarities between the modeling strategies and some Austrian concepts.
For example, p. 19, Economic Resources:
Can the Free Market Wage War?
Interventionism addresses a topic that I have found nowhere else in Mises: his analysis of how a free society should wage war. What is the alternative to total war with total state control?
