With great art, genius looks effortless. Think of Fred Astaire dancing or Jascha Heifitz playing violin. A whole symphonic work can appear graceful and natural, even easy, but it is merely a mask: you do not observe the blood, sweat, and tears. The audience only participates in the thrill of achievement at its final stage. This is as it should be.
It’s easy to find examples of patent abuse but its not often to find a company that uses patents that stifle a whole industry. Such may be the case with the Apple iPhone. I purchased an iPhone shortly after it came out, because I recognized that it was a revolutionary device. It was not a case of superior specifications, as many devices have
Barack Obama’s recent statement on fair trade , a statement applauded by some leading Republicans, contains some easily recognizable errors in international trade theory. The central problem with his remarks is seen in his following position: Now, one of the things that I talked about during the State of the Union address was making America more
The New York Times opinion page recently ran a series of short pieces on Rethinking How We Teach Economics , making the point that we need to change our economics instruction to be able to account for the financial crisis. There are several articles in the “debate,” but I would like to consider Alan Blinder’s contribution. In addition to being a
Have you ever wondered why power plugs have the shape they do? The common American Type A design dates back to the original 1920’s two-pin plug design. Why are we still using 1920’s technology to power electric devices when virtually every other household technology has experienced rapid change and evolution? It turns out that everything about
The New York Times reports that FEMA wasted over $100 million of ice that was intended to help to hurricane victims . One frustrated truck driver had to drive 2,000 pounds of ice around for 4,100 miles, being redirected half a dozen times, and waiting up to a week (with the engine running) for FEMA to make up their mind. 59% of the purchased ice
Google under scrutiny, Officials say it’s dodging taxes by building on federal land : “Any for-profit entity of (Google’s) magnitude using land owned by the people should not escape paying their fair share,” said Larry Stone, Santa Clara County’s tax assessor. If Google were to build its campus on county land, he estimated, it could generate as
In the latest of a series of rulings, a federal judge has issued a $1.45 billion judgment against Morgan Stanley for not keeping records of email communications . Partly in response to such rulings, many corporations now have detailed email retention policies and keep years of email records. But this is a lose-lose situation for companies: five
The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject
The incredible popularity of the Mises Institute’s website is due mainly to the great content it contains, but no one would know about all that content without the software behind it. While I wrote the content management system for Mises.org, I couldn’t have done it without the ideas and sample code provided by the developer community. 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.