Mises Search

I n response to an earlier article on Mises.org in which I described why capitalism, and not labor unions, have given us more and more leisure time quite a few people emailed me to ask: ”But aren’t workers at a disadvantage in bargaining individually for wages, and aren’t unions valuable for that reason?” I never argued that unions had no value,

Imagine that I get together with my friends in Auburn (say, Lew Rockwell and Joseph Stromberg) and open up a coffee shop in Auburn , Alabama called “The Austrian Café.”  We offer a selection of strong, European coffee, assorted desserts, and occasional music (sing-alongs on Friday and Saturday evenings, in German and English). It turns out to be

Macroeconomic model builders have finally realized what Henry Hazlitt and John T. Flynn (among others) knew in the 1930s:  FDR’s New Deal made the Great Depression longer and deeper. It is a myth that Franklin D. Roosevelt “got us out of the Depression” and “saved capitalism from itself,” as generations of Americans have been taught by the state’s

Two years ago I was on a faculty committee to choose the one book that incoming freshman would be asked to read and discuss in discussion groups during freshman orientation. It was the school of business’s turn to choose the book, so I thought it would be valuable, for once, for the freshman to read a book that was not the latest popular left-wing

Both of the major political parties in the U.S. long ago adopted the rhetoric of the socialist Left with regard to tax deductions.  The mortgage interest deduction, the state and local taxes deduction, and all others, are denigrated either as “loopholes” that need to be slammed shut or as sources of needless confusion.  A November 8, 2004

It is sometimes said that long lines at theaters, sports events, and amusement parks are signs of a market that is not clearing and that prices should be raised. In fact, people pay in a combination of money and time costs, that’s all. With a moderate-income clientele it makes sense for some people to ration by waiting rather than by cash. These

The Bush proposal  to spend zillions to supposedly improve marriages is being sold mostly in the name of “saving” the marriages of low-income Americans. It’s a classic case, in other words, of Mises’s theory of interventionism: The welfare state has wrecked millions of marriages by eliminating the guilt from abandoning one’s own children, and high

The Free Market 24, no. 10 (October 2004)   In Human Action , Ludwig von Mises wrote that labor unions have always been the primary source of anticapitalistic propaganda. I was reminded of this recently when I saw a bumper sticker proclaiming one of the bedrock tenets of unionism:  “The Union Movement:  The People Who Brought You the Weekend.”

The Free Market 24, no. 11 (November 2004)   M acroeconomic model builders have finally realized what Henry Hazlitt and John T. Flynn (among others) knew in the 1930s:  FDR’s New Deal made the Great Depression longer and deeper. It is a myth that Franklin D. Roosevelt “got us out of the Depression” and “saved capitalism from itself,” as

The Free Market 24, no. 12 (December 2004)   T wo years ago I was on a faculty committee to choose the one book that incoming freshmen would be asked to read and discuss in discussion groups during freshman orientation. It was the School of Business’s turn to choose the book, so I thought it would be valuable, for once, for the freshmen to read a