The Free Market 14, no. 2 (February 1996) Want to hear what a scoff sounds like? The next time you’re talking to a political scientist, an economist, or a public employee, mention the possibility of a private road. Roads aren’t supposed to be private, right? They are supposed to be “public goods,” meaning that capitalists can’t or won’t build
The Free Market 14, no. 3 (March 1996) Look at the back of your computer monitor, the bottom of your table lamp, or the label on your hair dryer. Chances are you will see the symbol “UL” with a circle around it. It stands for Underwriters Laboratories, a firm headquartered in Northbrook, Ill., and an unsung hero of the market economy. Most
The Free Market 14, no. 3 (March 1995) The government always wants more of our money, and too many economists are ready to make the case for surrendering our last dime. During the budget hysteria of 1990, for example, many economists claimed that the government needed to raise taxes to balance the budget. Anyone who disagreed was supposedly
The Free Market 14, no. 3 (March 1996) The joy erupting in Howard University’s student union was palpably motivated; O.J. Simpson would walk. “As the verdict was read, the place erupted into screaming and jumping. You couldn’t hear,” one observer put it. To the students, a falsely accused black man was able to get justice—in racist America, no
The Free Market 14, no. 3 (March 1996) George Wallace’s famous contention that “there ain’t a dime’s worth of difference” between Democrats and Republicans has received ample corroboration since the 1994 elections. The $50 billion Mexican peso bailout, opposed by some 80% of Americans, has been only the most flagrant example of the real meaning
The Free Market 14, no. 3 (March 1996) During the “shutdown” of the federal government, bureaucrats were divided between “essential” and “non-essential.” The designation caused enormous turmoil within agencies. People with lifetime jobs and gigantic pensions were deemed nonessential, while those holding short-term, highly paid, political
The Free Market 14, no. 6 (March 1996) In 1984, at a Mises Institute conference in Houston, some of us met O.P. Alford, III, for the first time. He was a quiet gentleman dressed in unassuming khaki trousers and shirt. His intelligence was evident and his manners were strikingly aristocratic. Those who visited with him that weekend noticed
The Free Market 14, no. 4 (April 1996) In the welfare debates, Congress spared what is perhaps the most objectionable part of the welfare state, cash subsidies for illegitimate children. The opponents had committed a terrible error early in the debate. They granted the first philosophical assumption of the program’s supporters: that we all
The Free Market 14, no. 4 (April 1996) Should free enterprise stop at the border? Of course not, and the attempt to make it so can drive us to ruin. Yet politicians are hammering free trade. Long-refuted myths are back in full force, and the voters are getting a miseducation in the economics of autarky. The politicians criticizing free trade are
The Free Market 14, no. 4 (April 1996) There it is, on the cover of Newsweek , in thick, blood-red letters: “Corporate Killers.” What follows is mug-like photo after photo, some of them grainy, of rich white men, all menacing and “greedy.” They are the CEOs of America’s top corporations. The story’s thesis is simple: they are destroying the
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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.