The Free Market 17, no. 11 (November 1999) Garet Garrett wrote in 1932, “Mass delusions are not rare. They salt the human story.” Indeed, mass delusions are no more apparent than in the realm of public policy and especially in the faith people have in their government to carry out functions designed to promote the public good. How else to
The Free Market 20, no. 11 (November 2002) There are those who want to believe that a market economy is itself unstable, prone to periods of excess and in need of stabilization by some outside authority. As Jeff Madrick wrote recently for the New York Times , “government itself is a necessary bulwark against recession.” Proponents of this view
The Free Market 21, no. 3 (March 2003) The once unsoiled House of Greenspan, feted as it was by the yeomen of the New Economy with its attendant mythology, now finds itself smeared by criticism that it created the stock market boom and is therefore responsible for the bust that has naturally followed. In Austrian circles, such criticism has
The Free Market 23, no. 7 (July 2003) How powerful is economic law, that mysterious aspect of the structure of reality that causes prices to rise and fall and thereby give direction concerning the use of resources? More powerful than the US government, even more powerful than all the governments in the world combined. In Iraq, the US
The Free Market 23, no. 8 (August 2003) There is always a bubble someplace. In a world of fiat currency and fractional-reserve banking, where money is effortlessly multiplied and pyramided, the sequence of boom and bust become inevitable, like the sequence of the seasons. In this system, the government cannot prevent the expected corrections
Volume 24, Number 1 January 2004 “The world is in permanent monetary crisis,” Murray N. Rothbard once observed, “but once in a while, the crisis flares up acutely, and we noisily shift gears from one flawed monetary system to another.” Monetary systems built on floating fiat currencies are fragile things. Most of the world currently operates under
The Free Market 24, no. 2 (February 2004) There is a fly in the ointment of economic recovery: a dollar that just won’t seem to stop its fall. The impression that this trend portends something ominous is bolstered by the inverse relationship of the dollar’s value on international exchange and the price of gold. As the dollar has fallen in the
The Free Market 24, no. 4 (April 2004) Debt is an institution in American government, long established and widespread. A cursory glance at debt statistics will quickly show that there has been a lull in the truth about debt, namely, that it cannot grow indefinitely at the rate at which it has been growing—at least not without a serious
The Free Market 18, no. 5 (May 2000) Americans are concerned about the rising cost of pharmaceutical drugs. This has drawn the attention of writers, politicians, and others who have attempted to deal with the issue in typical fashion by advocating the use of government force to implement their plan. Kathleen Day, a media fellow at the Kaiser
The Free Market 18, no. 9 (September 2000) Dictatorships always immediately ban short selling,” wrote Fred Schwed, Jr., in his fun 1940 book on investing, “since it is axiomatic with them that no professional pessimists are going to be tolerated.” Indeed, the long-vilified bearish practice called short selling involves a sale of borrowed stock
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.