The Free Market 13, no. 5 (May 1995) Steve Stockman, among the best of Washington’s freshmen Congressmen, holds a daily prayer session that staff members attend voluntarily. Last year, nobody could have stopped it. But thanks to the “Contract With America,” Congress now has to comply with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The ACLU says Stockman may be
One ironic legacy of the Clinton administration is the rearming of the American citizenry. Each time Clinton and his friends in Congress threaten another round of anti-gun regulations, the American people respond by stocking up on as many guns as possible. This is all to the good: an armed citizenry translates to less crime and more security, and
Ladies, if you wear shoes from Nine West—maker of 1 out of 5 women’s shoes sold in the US—the government is here to tell you that you have been ripped off, exploited, and victimized by a price-fixing conspiracy hatched at the highest levels of the corporate elite. To defend your rights, the government has extracted $34 million from the company’s
In economics, people often mix up cause and effect. Observe, for example, that both wages and labor market regulations have increased for most of this century. Did the laws and court decisions cause wages to rise? Or did wages rise despite the interventions; might they be even higher without regulation? Adopting the view that government can
In an awful, but not unexpected, ruling on a long-standing dispute between Europe and the US, the World Trade Organization says that the US must stop permitting US exporters to set up foreign subsidiaries that save as much as 30 percent in taxes they would otherwise pay. Now the US must either raise taxes by eliminating loopholes or face massive
Following the media campaign against Lott, many people were astonished by the Senator’s willingness to jettison all political principle for the sake of saving his status as Majority Leader. Why would a conservative Republican suddenly find himself embracing the full panoply of the left-wing racial agenda and flog himself so mercilessly? Consider
On July 8, Doug Williams, a 48-year-old assembly-line worker at the Lockheed Martin plant in Meridian, Mississippi, walked out of a meeting with managers on how to get along with fellow employees—just the sort of meeting encouraged by federal law to assure that everyone appreciates the merit of diversity and that no one is being harassed in the
Many states have enacted higher minimum wage laws than are imposed by the federal government. The federal minimum is $5.15 per hour, whereas in Washington State it will soon be $7.16. A proposal in Madison, Wisconsin , would raise it to $7.75. “Living wage” legislation in 110 local governments imposes wages as high as $10. Senator Kennedy is
Freedom can stand or fall on issues large (wars, depressions, natural disasters) or small (a hundred thousand regulations that manage our daily life). Regulations on food labeling count among the small issues. It is a tricky issue for market advocates because bad labeling might actually count as breach of contract and thereby require legal
Are you already fed up with hearing about the “ Ownership Society “ that Mr. Bush wants to create? Without television and the web, it took years for the phrase “New Deal” to become tiresome. But at some point, even FDR stopped using it. The “Great Society” had an even shorter shelf life and became a phrase of derision, uttered with a snarl rather
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.