From the great Spanish scholastic Juan de Mariana, writing in the late 15th century: “It is not rare for the iniquitous and equally useless suggestion of altering the value of money to be whispered in the king’s ear. With this measure, they say, no one will suffer direct harm. The intrinsic value of money will be lower, but the legal value will
Many thoughtful readers, responding to my Mises.org article “Mad Socialism Disease” , have pointed out that there is not much good science out there that supports the belief that anyone has died in Brtain due to Mad Cow, and that the widely held belief that this is the case is based on bad science and bad journalism. Writes Tony Baxendale: I am
The US Agriculture Department’s boorish manipulation of the mad cow scare last December is coming back to haunt it. Several reports are out today indicating that the single confirmed case of BSE at that farm in Washington State was not sick after all. Newsday reports that “[c]ontrary to the department’s account, three eyewitnesses at the
...Call your office. A reader wrote this morning in response to my Martha Stewart article on Mises.org: “[I]t is one matter to profess innocence when questioned by the media, it is quite another animal when someone intentionally sets out to deceive the public by voluntarily proclaiming their [sic] innocence in order to prop up their [sic]
A new series on the Traffic Security Administration, running in the Seattle Times , reminds us of something that is obvious to anyone who has flown after 9/11: centralized government property protection is always a bad idea. An excerpt: Four months ago, at Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport, a conveyor belt jammed at 9 a.m. For 90 minutes,
For kicks, and to make sure that I don’t just buy libertarian “indoctrination” without listening to the opposition, I’m on the Heritage Foundation e-mail list. Today, I received an entertaining article on the PolicyWire. Marriage Amendment Protects Federalism by Edwin Meese III. The sad thing is, it’s not intended to be entertaining. But, when
The Free Market 24, no. 3 (March 2004) The Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman recently scored a front-page story about President Bush that would have galvanized DC conservatives three years earlier if the same words had been written about President Clinton. Writes Weisman: “Confounding President Bush’s pledges to rein in government growth,
The Free Market 24, no. 10 (October 2004) Last year, the governor of Alabama proposed and then overwhelmingly lost a bitter referendum to increase taxes and boost revenue. Voters rightly saw the campaign as a slick attempt to expand the public sector’s power, prestige, and wealth transfers by increasing the degree of legal plunder in Alabama’s
This is how it goes . The government bungles its distribution scheme for flu vaccines, causing an unanticipated supply shock, and suppliers face an upward pressure on prices. If the high price is charged, then your anal neighbor, who regularly receives flu shots even though he is in a low-risk category for catching the flu, decides to forego the
Some quick ruminations on medieval and Thomist economic thought. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas is one of the world’s most reknowned masterpieces of intellectual thought. The medieval intellectuals prohibited the taking of interest, a philosophy fortified by earlier, Aristotelian doctrine. (The Second Lateran Council explicitly forbade usury
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.