THE ANIMATING CONTEST FOR FREEDOM This July 4th we celebrate once again the beginning of an amazing venture--the American experiment in ordered liberty. In the conflict and tumult of politics today it is easy to forget the spirit of 1776 and the ideas on which this nation was founded. We must not. Two revolutions contend for the American soul. The
From INVESTORS BUSINESS DAILY Appearing on July 9, 1999 If voters named you economic czar, what would you do? Let’s say you got rid of the market economy. You had to plan all output yourself. Could you do it? Well, let’s make your task a little easier. You just have to plan the production of this year’s wheat crop. You have to get it to market at
A year ago July, I sent my girlfriend some flowers. I picked up the phone, called a florist, and, for about thirty dollars, she received one dozen roses. Seven months later, for Valentine’s Day, I called the same florist and again ordered one dozen roses for my girlfriend. This time, however, they would cost one hundred twenty dollars. I was
[From Money Magazine , August 1999] In her superb new biography of J.P. Morgan , Jean Strouse quotes a few lines written by the historian Henry Adams in 1902: “Pierpont Morgan...is carrying loads that stagger the strongest nerves. Everyone asks what would happen if some morning he woke up dead.” Almost a century later, the men and women at the top
Watching the national debate about what to do or not do about Social Security (SS), it is tempting to think the worst about our fellow citizens and the people who represent them in Washington. The debate suggests that most people have no idea what SS is, how the program figures in Washington’s finances, or how SS comes to shuffle around hundreds
A Seminar with J. Guido Hülsmann Held at the Ludwig von Mises Institute June 1999 In the desert of academic economics, those looking for a drink of clarity got even more than they might have hoped for in “Austrian Economics vs. The Mainstream,” an eight-part seminar directed by J. Guido Hülsmann. Professor Hülsmann began with a solidly Misesian
One of the terrible consequences of the income tax was to provide an excuse for the federal government to pry into people’s finances. Today, if financial regulators want to bully citizens into a more compliant mode, just about any excuse will do. As Michael Kelly explains below, this prying instinct has set off a furious war between regulators and
Myths die hard, and in the case of the “Phillips Curve,” it has taken 20 years of obvious contrary evidence to convince many economists that there is no fixed inverse relationship between unemployment and price inflation. (Jeffrey Herbener of Grove City College has argued the relationship never existed, not even at the purely empirical level.) The
From Investors Business Daily February 16, 1999 By launching a multibillon-dollar ‘’livability agenda’’ in its fiscal year 2000 budget, the White House has catapulted a six-letter word from local zoning meetings to the national political stage: sprawl. For most people, sprawl means suburban development that’s gone too far. Lots of folks aren’t
It seems everyone in D.C. claims to believe in “free trade,” but the meaning of the phrase is being drained out through sheer political hypocrisy. A true free trader is not a supporter of export subsidies and bailouts, foreign aid and mercantilist trade treaties, centralized executive power or global environmental regulations. Simply put, a free
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.