988 May Be a Government Experiment With No Exit Plan

Tags: Big Government, Bureaucracy and Regulation, Media and Culture

11/11/2026 Patrick N. Dempsey

The government’s 988 line was created as a hot line to prevent suicides. While the intentions behind it might be good, there is no evidence that it actually succeeds in reducing the number of people who take their own lives.

Original article: https://mises.org/mises-wire/988-may-be-government-experiment-no-exit-plan

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.

Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.