In the ten years between 1994 and 2004, a dramatic turn took place within the Republican Party. The themes of the 1994 election weren’t just about cutting government, though that was the central campaign promise of that generation of elected officials sent to Washington. The core was more revolutionary than that: it was a dogged commitment to full freedom philosophy forged in opposition to all the works of the central state.
Many economists mistakenly believe taxation can be good for economic growth, that war can buck up prosperity, and that even natural disasters can spur wealth creation by causing people to spend. All of this is fallacy because it fails to consider the costs of destruction, the alternative use of resources, and the unseen effects of diverted uses of property.
State medical boards, writes Henry E. Jones, masquerade as consumer protection agencies to get public support, police powers, and taxpayer dollars.
Recorded at the Austrian Economics and Financial Markets conference at The Venetian Hotel Resort Casino, Las Vegas, 02-18-2005
The consequences of government control over such stock-market investments would be extremely grave, writes George Reisman. But there is another way.
How does any political movement that begins by being opposed to the state avoid being absorbed by the state? The most crucial step, writes Lew Rockwell, is to decide what you are for and what you are against from the very outset.
Thanks to a little-noticed item in Bush's budget, writes Joseph Potts, it won't just be Islamist suicide bombers whose families are limned and paid off for the death of their fighters.
European antitrust regulators have taken the worst of American antitrust "analysis," argues DT Armentano, and made it even worse.
The true state of the Union, writes DW MacKenzie, is that its chief executive fails to grasp the profound truth that central planning by political elites can never match the results of decentralized planning by the general public--even when it is done in the name of liberty.
Sponsored by the Mises Institute and held in Atlanta, Georgia; 26-27 September 1997.
