In Defense of Free Capital Markets: The Case Against a New International Financial Architecture. By David DeRosa. (Bloomberg Press: 2001) $19.56. David DeRosa’s latest book, In Defense of Free Capital Markets , has been hailed by such eminent economists as Milton Friedman, Anna Schwartz, and Steve Hanke as one of the best libertarian
Are we losing our freedom? Are we, as a society, losing our ability to distinguish between what we don’t like and what ought to be criminal? Every day, we see some glorious scheme being proposed to make us all safer, healthier, or wealthier, or to give us whiter teeth. To evaluate whether violating that law ought to be a crime, we need to ask:
California is a beautiful state with a (mostly) mild, sunny climate, which is one reason why so many people live there. But who would want to move there, it is often asked, if one had to endure chronic water shortages, earthquakes and now, “rolling blackouts?” These events are typically blamed on either Mother Nature or the free market, but in
Americans have been led to believe that when they celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday each year on February 12 they are celebrating freedom, the preservation of the union, and a reaffirmation of the principles of the Declaration of Independence. This belief is a testament to the notion that in war the victors get to write the history. Lincoln
A recent trip to Santa Monica, California, provided me with a clear explanation of why Californians, despite all their wealth, talent, and resourcefulness, have the energy supply system of a Third World country. Like so many tiny Latin American dictatorships, or the outer provinces of India, Californians can no longer rely on a steady supply of
America’s emergency room physicians met recently for their annual convention and emerged with their well-scrubbed hands extended and begging for government handouts. Terrorism, they say, means that taxpayers will have to hand over additional billions of dollars to the emergency rooms of America’s hospitals. Additional tax dollars would not be
Among those who see privatization--the disassociation of government from goods and services that are otherwise economically viable---as a very desirable thing, a debate has raged for quite some time. Should government subsidize what is being privatized as a step away from nationalization? The same sort of debate would be quite appropriate when it
As reported in The New York Times [link requires registration] an emerging and relatively novel school of economic theorists is now making a pitch for more government regulation of the economy. In particular, Professors David Laibson of Harvard University and Sendhil Mullainathan of MIT are making some waves with their idea that economic
In Tipton, Iowa, a teacher resigns because, reportedly, superiors were about to reprimand her for allowing a student to do research on rapper Eminem. In Mishawaka, Indiana, more than a thousand students were reported to have walked out of school because they didn’t welcome a virtual complete ban on music in response to a parent’s complaint about
When I was a student at the Munich American High School and Cleveland’s John Adams High School, I studied American history and was taught what had been then and still seems to be the standard account of the American Civil War. My own children have received roughly the same instruction during their primary and secondary educations in Virginia,
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.