I’ve written before on government attempts to stimulate entrepreneurship and innovation through subsidies, prizes, tax incentives, state-funded science parks and incubators, and similar policies. Both theory and evidence suggest that these programs are unlikely to be successful , for a variety of reasons. Government actors lack the information to
In the wake of the contentious confirmation hearings for Betsy Devos as Education Secretary, Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie offered a solution: abolish the Department of Education. The Hill reports : Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie’s bill is only a page long, after merely stating the Department of Education would terminate on Dec. 31, 2018
Hope is in short supply these days, while despair and hate are enjoying an enormous surplus. To give an example, there are currently two types of stories that fill my news feed. The first are about politics and the perpetual horrors it unleashes on the world: there’s a new scandal every day, and war, protectionism, and nationalism are on the rise,
The title of this talk, as some of you will know, is taken from a recent book by the heroic Russian dissident intellectual, Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive to 1984 ? What is implied is not that things will suddenly go kaput in 1984 — that would be too much of a coincidence — but that, in terms of the present discussion, for the next
(Address to the Mt. Pelerin Society, Brussels, September, 1974. Previously unpublished.) The New Left of the late 1960s was an international phenomenon and one which manifested appropriately differing emphases in different countries. It is my impression that it was the American wing of the New Left that most often expressed a point of view with
Many years ago, the mass circulation Reader’s Digest had a feature titled “Humor in These United States.” The following would have qualified for inclusion. Greg Mankiw, author of a leading economic textbook, former Chair of the G.W. Bush Council of Economic Advisers, member of the Romney inner circle, widely praised for his decency as a human
35 years ago, I was worried. I was working at a free-market think tank at a university, and I could see that Austrian economics was becoming less and less influential. Who would speak for untrammeled freedom and capitalism? Sound money and no central banking? Would economics entirely betray its great advocates of liberty from Menger to Mises, in
Higher education professionals have become increasingly specialized in ‘cheating the system’ over the past 50 years. The table below excellently summarizes the findings of Edwards and Roy in their recently published work on “ Maintaining Scientific Integrity in a Climate of Perverse Incentives and Hypercompetition .” The mismatch between the
[Reprinted from the Lara-Murphy Report , February 2017.] LARA-MURPHY REPORT: How did you become interested in Austrian economics? JEFF DEIST: Fortunately Austrian economics became interested in me, through two happy developments. First, my father had a tattered paperback copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom on his bookshelf when I was a teenager.
If everyone could just have a college degree imagine how prosperous America would be? That’s the idea behind free community college tuition and cheap government insured student loan debt. There is no sense stopping at undergraduate, maybe we should all have a law degree? Josh Mitchell writes in the Wall Street Journal about, “a business network
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.