The Free Market 6, no. 8 (August 1988) In primitive societies, witchdoctors legitimized tyrannical government by naming it the mandate of heaven. In return, they got a cut of the earthly loot. In the U.S., some economists serve the same function. For promoting government intervention as scientific, and advising on the most efficient forms, they
The Free Market 6, no. 9 (September 1988) American families need more affordable child care. But the answer is not more government involvement. When child care is run, funded, and regulated by the government, it can only make the existing problem worse. And it’s bad for our liberty as well. Young couples with children may think they want
The Free Market 6, no. 10 (October 1988) On August 2, 1988, President Ronald Reagan announced that he had changed his mind about the pro-union plant-closing bill. He had vetoed it three months earlier, but now let it become law without his signature after intense pressure from presidential nominee George Bush and former Treasury Secretary James
The Free Market 6, no. 10 (October 1988) International statists have long dreamed of a world currency and a world central bank. Now it looks as if their dream may come true. European governments have targeted 1992 for abolishing individual European currencies and replacing them with the European Currency Unit, the ECU. Next they plan to set up a
The Free Market 6, no. 12 (December 1988) There is no clearer demonstration of the essential identity of the two political parties than their position on the minimum wage. The Democrats propose to raise the legal minimum wage from $3.35 an hour, to which it had been raised by the Reagan administration during its allegedly free-market salad days
Ever since Black, or Meltdown, Monday October 19th, the public has been deluged with irrelevant and contradictory explanations and advice from politicians, economists, financiers, and assorted pundits. Let’s try to sort out and rebut some of the nonsense about the nature, causes, and remedies for the crash. Myth One It was not a crash, but a
The Free Market 6, no. 3 (March 1988) The hottest new topic in mathematics, physics, and allied sciences is “chaos theory.” It is radical in its implications, but no one can accuse its practitioners of being anti- mathematical, since its highly complex math, including advanced computer graphics, is on the cutting edge of mathematical theory. In
The Free Market 6, no. 4 (April 1988) The Federal Reserve—the U. S. government’s central bank—was schemed at a secret meeting in 1910 at J. P. Morgan’s hunting club on Jekyll Island, Georgia. The participants—who claimed, as they boarded a private railroad car in Hoboken, New Jersey to be going on a hunting trip—were: Senator Nelson W. Aldrich
The Free Market 6, no. 5 (May 1988) Mark Shields, a columnist for the Washington Post, recently wrote of President Reagan’s “blind devotion to the doctrine of free trade.” If President Reagan has a devotion to free trade, it must be blind because he has been way off the mark. In fact, he has been the most protectionist president since Herbert
[ Free Market , 1988] In the March 1988 issue of The Free Market, Dr. Walter Block makes a solid case for a free market in human body parts. I agree with Dr. Block’s analysis of the problems caused by governmental intervention into the market for used human body parts, and offer the following as an extension of that analysis. The process whereby
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.