The only good tax is no tax. Why? How would we fund government without taxes? Those are good questions to ask. But first let’s understand what taxes are. Throughout most of history, governments--usually monarchies headed by kings, emperors, pharaohs and other major or minor tyrants--actually owned everything under their rule, including, believe it
Bill McKibben, a virulent environmentalist, was given the job of reviewing Peter Huber’s new, market friendly work on the environment, Hard Green:Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists (Basic Books, 1999), for The New York Review of Books . And he certainly has done his best to attempt to obliterate Huber’s idea that perhaps
Back in 1980, I applied to become a Congressional Fellow under a program that would place a philosopher or two into some Representative’s office and be in on brainstorming various public policy proposals. I made it to the final list and was invited to go to John Hopkins University in Baltimore where we were interviewed by a selection panel. When
As with so many mainstream publications, the news division of my local paper repeats unhesitatingly nearly all of the panic about the environment. Why not? How independent can editors and reporters really afford to be? This question is especially appropriate in a climate of widespread political correctness and about members of the profession that
A few days ago I received an e-mail telling me that some producer at ABC-TV News was hoping to find some evidence of what taxation does to people. The post went on: “Specifically, the producer wants to find someone who is trying to cope with the high medical costs of helping an ill family member. She wants to make the point that if this person
This is a pretty good measure of how far we have come in America in our understanding of freedom from that of the founders: Bill Clinton awarded the “Medal of Freedom” to John Kenneth Galbraith on August 9, 2000, despite the fact that Galbraith has been a stalwart champion of the very opposite idea of freedom from that laid out by those founders.
At Harvard University, a famous defender of communitarianism, Michael Sandel of the Department of Government, has denounced competition and is supposed to have insisted that his own kids play noncompetitive baseball. The reason? He believes that competition is too individualistic, supports a spirit of rivalry and undermines the cooperative
You would think that smart intellectuals would realize that no such animal as capitalism exists in the USA or anywhere else. In America we have a welfare state, a highly regulated, even regimented economy, which, admittedly, is relatively more free than the economies of other countries around the globe but by no means as free with respect to
Gasoline prices are zooming (45% over last year) and drivers are worried that this may affect their summer vacation plans, while truckers marched on Washington D.C. protesting high diesel costs. Pursuing votes, presidential candidates are scrambling to provide political solutions for the doubling of heating oil prices in New Hampshire in the last
Since the early 1970s, landowners have been at the mercy of federal regulators wielding their power over private property deemed to be wetlands. But there’s also some good news: Federal wetland policies have suffered setbacks from court decisions limiting regulatory overreach. And a case now in appeal to the Supreme Court could provide the relief
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.