The Free Market 26, no. 9 (September 2006) For lack of a better term I am dubbing it Woods’s Law: whenever the private sector introduces an innovation that makes the poor better off than they would have been without it, or that offers benefits or terms that no one else is prepared to offer them, someone—in the name of helping the poor—will call
Thank goodness for the San Diego City Council, which has taken a stand against convenience and inexpensive groceries. No Wal-Mart Supercenter will be allowed to open in San Diego. “I have a vision for San Diego and that vision is about walkable, livable communities, not big, mega-structures that inhibit people’s lives,” said councilman Tony Young.
I rather like this article from The Atlantic , arguing that the typical arguments against chain stores are misplaced. Among other things, it cites a planning consultant who finds that the aesthetes all hate Pottery Barn because it’s a chain and therefore dehumanizing, but that if you show them pictures of a Pottery Barn with a different name on it
Here’s my review of Alejandro Chafuen’s stunning book Faith and Liberty: The Economic Thought of the Late Scholastics , a truly original and groundbreaking contribution to the history of economic thought. It partly inspired one of my own books
Here is a Washington Times piece about the Regnery series of books that includes my own Politically Incorrect Guide to American History . No discussion of its Austrian content.
The Mises Circle event this past weekend — The Fed and War Finance — was a wonderful time; the full house at the University Club seemed to agree. Apart from having my toiletries confiscated at the airport (yes, they mean it when they say no liquids or gels), I was glad to visit New York City again, where I lived for five years, and see some of the
This month, the Brookings Institution released a report that condemned rent-to-own stores for allegedly preying upon consumers. Last month, the Buffalo News , as part of a series on industries that supposedly preyed upon the poor (”preying upon” evidently meaning “offering a service no one else was providing”), denounced these stores for the
For lack of a better term I am dubbing it Woods’s Law: whenever the private sector introduces an innovation that makes the poor better off than they would have been without it, or that offers benefits or terms that no one else is prepared to offer them, someone — in the name of helping the poor — will call for curbing or abolishing it. Last time I
More clichés have been directed at the market economy than at just about any other social phenomenon. Reading through the proceedings of an international symposium from 1982, edited by Walter Block and Irving Hexham, I came across this remark: The free market philosophy and social reality makes us look at the whole of social life as a market. It
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.