The Free Market 16, no. 5 (May 1998) Labor Day, 1998. Time for picnics and taking it easy. Time too for thousands of blue-collar faithful to gather in Detroit not far from the United Automobile Workers Solidarity House to hail pet politicos and union chiefs and speechify, talk up income redistribution, snitch credit for America’s high living
The Free Market 16, no. 6 (June 1998) Around the country, sports entrepreneurs have been responding to a perceived social problem by doing what they do best: efficiently serving customers. The advent of the work-out craze led to the blossoming of a prospering health-club industry. Along with growth, however, came certain problems, some of which
The Free Market 16, no. 9 (September 1998) When Carol Browner, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, proposed new air quality standards last year, she claimed that thousands of Americans are being killed every year by tiny particles in the air with diameters of less than 2.5 microns. The EPA currently regulates airborne pollutants 10
The Free Market 16, no. 9 (September 1998) Can government do a better job than private markets in any area of the economy? Consider: The tax-funded Human Genome Project, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, has been the toast of the scientific elite for nearly a decade. It held out the promise of mapping of the entire structure of
The Free Market 16, no. 10 (October 1998) In the midst of an economic boom, strange things were happening at General Motors. Huge swatches of its highly paid, coddled, unionized labor force were on strike. The result was catastrophic: GM plants all over North America shut down. In a free market, the management (serving at the behest of the
The Free Market 16, no. 11 (November 1998) The coalition of government bureaucrats, politicians, trial lawyers, and “political activists” who have orchestrated the demonization of “Big Tobacco” are about to wage a similar smear campaign against what the pressure group Common Cause has labeled “Big Booze.” The beer, wine, and liquor industries
The Free Market 17, no. 1 (January 1999) The logic of the market is predicated on the pervasive and glorious inequality of man. No two people have the same scales of values, talents, or ambitions. It is this radical inequality, and the freedom to choose our own lot in life, that makes possible the division of labor and exchange. Through money
The Free Market 17, no. 1 (January 1999) In what can only be termed as truly bizarre, an Alabama local of the steelworkers union demanded that Alabama Governor Fob James close the international port at Mobile to all steel imports. Besides the fact that it would be clearly a violation of the U.S. Constitution for the governor to grant the union’s
The Free Market 17, no. 2 (February 1999) The policy agenda of the Clinton administration is usually described as halting, pragmatic, and poll driven. But in its approach to the issue of medical insurance and the drive to socialize medical care, it has been systematic, principled, and highly strategic. The Clinton government is using the
The Free Market 17, no. 2 (February 1999) To hear educators and activists talk, one might actually believe that apathy threatens to become the defining existential feature of American youth. One hardly need recite the litany of the numerous civic shortcomings regularly imputed by youth organizers eager to demonstrate the self-absorption of
What is the Mises Institute?
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.