The Free Market 15, no. 2 (February 1997) Among the many excuses for government planning is that it makes life safer for one and all. The automobile bears the brunt of this central planning. Like most all interventions in the free market, the effect of mandates to make the car safer is nearly the opposite. Witness the recent air bag fiasco. Joan
The Free Market 15, no. 2 (February 1997) If members of the congressional classes of 1994 and 1996 are serious about curbing government, they should rally around Ron Paul, the newly elected congressman from Texas’s 14th district. For Ron, a longtime friend of the Mises Institute, is the outstanding political opponent of the main engine of
The Free Market 15, no. 2 (February 1997) Academic fraud has never been more acceptable. Works of literature are purged of material contrary to the latest political fad. Photographs are airbrushed to exclude incorrect habits like smoking. Movies with the wrong message are cut. The same is true in economics, and the most recent con job involves
The Free Market 15, no. 3 (March 1997) My idea of a great president is one who acts in accordance with his oath of office to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Not since the presidency of Grover Cleveland has any president achieved greatness by this standard. Worse, the most admired have been those who failed
The Free Market 15, no. 3 (March 1997) Remember how, when you were a kid, the drawstrings on your jacket were constantly catching on the seesaw or the swing? How sometimes a passing car would snag the drawstrings of a friends hood, garroting him before your eyes? Neither do I. But someone at the Consumer Product Safety Commission must, because
The Free Market 15, no. 3 (March 1997) The welfare state keeps being reinvented under new labels. In 1993, the Clinton administration renewed the Bush program (dreamed up by then HUD secretary Jack Kemp) called “Moving to Opportunity” (MTO). It gave welfare recipients housing vouchers worth as much as $1,677 per month for rental housing in
The Free Market 15, no. 3 (March 1997) Congress proved it: not even childbirth is off limits to federal mandates. Forty-eight hours will heretofore be the minimum hospital stay for new mothers, Congress said, double the time insurance companies used to cover. Who could disagree with such tender loving care, courtesy of D.C.? There’s a cost even
The Free Market 15, no. 3 (March 1997) They should have called it the Federal Advisory Panel for a Huge and Sneaky Tax Increase and a Massive Increase in Corporate Welfare. That—and not “privatization”—is the real upshot of what the advisory counsel to fix Social Security recommended. We’re not talking here about minor subsidies and taxes, but a
The Free Market 15, no. 4 (April 1997) The personal, political, and scholarly papers of Ludwig von Mises have been discovered in a formerly secret archive in Moscow. So have the papers of many of Mises’s colleagues and associates during his years in Vienna, including friends and foes in academia, politics, and business. What does this startling
The Free Market 15, no. 4 (April 1997) President Clinton, standing tall among Miami schoolchildren and pushing the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, calls on America’s youth to stand for values. So does the U.S. Department of Education in its master plan, Goals 2000 . As do Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, the Rainbow Curriculum in
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.