Those possessing the anti-capitalist mentality — so ascendant in our culture today — often critique market actors as being solely motivated by “greed.” Surely economic systems based on nobler motivations, they say, would better promote the long-run interests of the planet. The Voluntary Marketplace Uses Greed as Motivation to Serve Others This is
The Free Market 31, no. 5 (May 2013) You may have heard of Lilly Ledbetter. If you are concerned about the sorry state of U.S. employment, you may wish you hadn’t. This woman from Jacksonville, Alabama, a minor figure in the 2012 presidential campaign—occasionally invoked by Barack Obama, mostly ignored by Mitt Romney—is a former Goodyear
The Free Market 26, no. 3 (March 2005) I didn’t think anyone would dare to apply Bastiat’s Broken Window fallacy to the human tragedy that played itself out along the rim of the Indian Ocean, but sadly, faith in economic fallacies is even more common than deadly tsunamis. Many economists mistakenly believe taxation can be good for economic
In their recently published paper, “The Curley Effect: The Economics of Shaping the Electorate” (Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Vol. 21(1), April 2005, pp. 1-19), Harvard economists Glaeser and Shleifer argue that democratic leaders can mix incendiary rhetoric and the redistributive powers of the state to encourage political
I recently heard from Jason McBride, who was the subject of my last Mises.org article, “The Right to Set Your Own Price” . McBride, a gas station owner from Aliceville, Alabama, was arrested for violating Alabama’s “anti-gouging” law on the day that Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast. Jason told me that there was more to the story than
Time magazine reports on the Degania kibbutz’ decision to abandon socialism and allow the private ownership of property, a move many kibbutzim in Israel have been making in response to low productivity and the abandonment of their youth. From the article: The kibbutz was a socialist dream. But Degania’s manager, Tzali Koperstein, says, “From the
I realize that the framers of the Constitution required a census be taken every ten years. It was a mistake. It gave too much power to the federal government, power that was certain to be abused. And yet not even the most thorough search of the writings of the framers indicates that their objective was to help the welfare state do its thing. Its
In my part of the country, an emotional and as-of-yet unresolved debate has been taking place about how to best dispose of sarin nerve gas that has been stored at a local Army base. It seems that the only solution to ridding the area of this deadly substance is to custom-build an incinerator to burn it at a cost of millions of dollars. Needless to
When I was in graduate school, my fellow graduate students and I liked to blow off steam during study breaks by dissecting the political columns of the columnist Molly Ivins. Sitting around a table, eating our peanut butter and banana sandwiches, we would occasionally parse through a 750-word Ivans column, paragraph-by-paragraph, looking for
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.