As more and more Chinese attain standards of living and wealth that approach what has been known as middle-class in the developed world, they are discovering a “luxury” not previously known to them: chronic disabling illness. I remember when such matters first came to my awareness at the tender age of twelve, on a family visit to Canada. I
Date: August 14, 2006 To: Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, MIT From: Dr. John Q. Colleague [not anyone’s real name] Subj: Scientific Solidarity I’m sorry I had to decline your lunch invitation today. You seemed to know the excuse I gave you was just a cover. Of course, the reality was simply that the tenure committee is considering my application this
This is a story about a barbecue. In the South Florida back yard of a friend who had invited me over for dinner, I saw a most unusual barbecue, but what I learned about it from its owner informed me about a lot more than barbecues. It hinted at the incredible power of freedom — the freedom of people to trade with each other, over distances and
I’ve been there, so the things that John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, says in the June 2006 issue of Liberty magazine essentially ring true. Whole Foods is big now, one of the nation’s fastest growing mass retailers, with sales last year exceeding $5 billion and a gross profit of more than $1.6 billion — not a bad return in the grocery
Practically every major hedge fund manager in the country has read Fooled by Randomness , by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House 2004). First released in 2001, the book was updated in 2005 and expanded with a new postscript. Since Long Term Capital Management, the 1998 hedge fund debacle engineered by supposedly expert Nobel laureate economists
To prevent “burdensome competition” among utilities in a given area, governments have often granted legal local monopolies to specific water, electricity, and natural gas companies — or provided the services themselves. Competing firms have been legally excluded from the utility market, with disastrous results. Occasional blackouts and
At the core of praxeology lies the incontrovertible proposition that humans act. Action is the purposeful employment of means to achieve ends in accord with the actor’s values. The existence of action is axiomatic; the very attempt to deny it will result in its affirmation. Here, I defend this validation of the action axiom — a validation that has
I personally find all currently illegal drugs loathsome; they stunt the mind, inhibit the body, and curtail productivity. I would never consume such substances myself, and I would advise others against doing so. Yet, compared to the adverse effects of their illegalization, the harm of drugs themselves is small indeed. Drug-taking is extremely
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the
A recent story out of New Orleans sheds light on the inefficiency of socialist “charity.” Not only was FEMA unable to cater to people’s needs when they needed trailers, but now just the opposite is happening. Homeowners who have repaired their houses are having difficulty returning the trailers to FEMA . The agency, overwhelmed, is unable to
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.