The Free Market 15, no. 11 (November 1997) Employees at the Environmental Protection Agency presume to protect us from all sorts of supposed evils. But in doing so, no bureaucrats, save the tax collectors, are more vicious in their trampling of property rights. For example, they have made life miserable for people who own auto salvage and parts
The Free Market 15, no. 1 (November 1997) For fifteen tedious years, Republicans demanded that Congress give the president the “line-item veto.” Reaganites concocted this policy gimmick as a diversionary tactic. It allowed them to blame Congress when the budget wouldn’t balance and spending soared. If only the president could eliminate pork,
The Free Market 15, no. 12 (December 1997) After hundreds of years of attacks on Christmas, economists have finally gotten into the act. Yale University’s Joel Waldfogel, writing in the American Economic Review , condemns what he calls “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas.” Once you cut through the calculus and graphs, his conclusion is clear:
The Free Market 15, no. 12 (December 1997) Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert , emerged a few years back as one of the cleverest cartoonists in the long history of that art. His eponymous protagonist, by now familiar to everyone, is a software engineer with vaguely defined duties at a large technology firm. Dilbert’s closest
The Free Market 15, no. 12 (December 1997) When the Soviet Union’s central planners failed year after year to produce a respectable grain harvest, they blamed “bad weather.” If only the weather could be controlled, Moscow dreamed, communism might be made to work. Officially, communism is dead, but the bureaucratic obsession with controlling the
The Free Market 15, no. 12 (December 1997) ‘Seizing power is the essence of government as we know it. It’s not as easy as it once was. As public trust in government has plummeted, and resistance to central rule has grown, officials invent ever-new rationales. Here are just a few of the newest benefits the central state promises us if we
Gray Areas Mises Review 3, No. 3 (Fall 1997) ENDGAMES: QUESTIONS IN LATE MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT John Gray Polity Press, 1997, xii + 212 pgs. John Gray is a hard man to pin down. Just when you think you have understood his position, he declares inadequate what he has advocated only moments before. Endgames thus marks a definite stage forward in
An Economist Scorned Mises Review 3, No. 3 (Fall 1997) THE VICES OF ECONOMISTS — THE VIRTUES OF THE BOURGEOISIE Deirdre N. McCloskey Amsterdam University Press, 1996, 135 pgs. Let me set readers’ minds at ease. As most people will have heard, our distinguished author has recently found the gender in which he was born overly confining. Donald
All in the Family? Mises Review 3, No. 3 (Fall 1997) MARX, HAYEK, AND UTOPIA Chris Matthew Sciabarra SUNY Press, 1995. x + 178 pgs. Within Marx, Hayek, and Utopia lies a very good book struggling to escape. Chris Sciabarra has asked a penetrating question and brought to light important material in his pursuit of an answer to it. Unfortunately, he
Wither’d Garland of War Mises Review 3, No. 3 (Fall 1997) THE COSTS OF WAR: AMERICA’S PYRRHIC VICTORIES John V. Denson, Editor Transaction Publishers, 1997, viii + 450 pgs. The contributors to this outstanding volume have grasped a simple but unfashionable truth: war is a great evil. It entails horrible suffering and death on a large scale and has
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.