Mises Search

As the legend goes, the scheme that would make Carlo Ponzi a household name occurred to Carlo when he was a young man. Carlo would sit on his front steps in Boston and watch his neighbors return home from a day’s work. It was during one of these daydreaming sessions that his innovation struck. Predictably enough, the first victim of what would

[ Originally published January 4, 2002. ] John Walker, who left his California home to join the Taliban, was hardly the first American citizen to be seduced to sign onto a foreign ideological movement. As America sank into depression in the 1930s , it also embarked on what would be called its “Red Decade” of infatuation with Joseph Stalin’s Soviet

CIA director George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee that there is every reason to expect more terror attacks in the coming months, because al-Qaida has not been destroyed. He is probably right, and he might have gone on to note that government has failed in its promise to protect Americans against terrorism, and that would-be

On June 18, 2002, Joseph Farah, syndicated columnist and founder of the alternative news website, WorldNetDaily.com, published a column entitled “ Why I’m not a libertarian .” (This article was preceded by his column “ Why I’m not a conservative ,” and followed by one called “ Why I’m not a liberal .”) In the June 18 piece, Mr. Farah lists several

In June,  ABC World News Tonight ran a story on the decision by an increasing number of employers to contractually bind employees to settle all disputes between themselves and the firm through arbitration. The Web page for this report was entitled “ No Right to Sue - Workers, Consumers Unwittingly Allow Mandatory Arbitration .” This televised

While watching the evening news the other day, I saw something I never expected to ever see anywhere, let alone on the CBC, Canada’s official state broadcaster. I saw a news story in which the state advertised its failure to deal with the recurrent droughts on the Prairies, and, more important, I saw the success of private enterprise in stepping

Ludwig von Mises was born in 1881, when the Prussian autocrat Otto von Bismarck was at the height of his power, and in his book Planning for Freedom , Mises speaks of “the clash of two orthodoxies; the Bismarck orthodoxy versus the Jefferson orthodoxy.” Abraham Lincoln is incorrectly remembered as a man in the Jeffersonian tradition and as the

Lately, pundits and commentators have suggested that the scandals that brought down Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom simply are more proof that trade and enterprise are inherently corrupt and pose a danger to the public. Some have even seriously claimed they represent the failings of a society with too much freedom, as if there could be such a

Mainstream economists like to attribute recessions to external events, rather than to domestic affairs. For instance, David Wyss, an economist with Standard & Poor’s in New York, said, “If you include the most recent downturn, then we have had four out of the past four recessions caused by the Middle East.” But that’s a myth. While events that

Washington loves the analogy—and reality—of war. Let’s take a moment to consider one of the most famous uses of that term, the War on Poverty. On March 16, 1964, in a special message to Congress, President Johnson delivered his proposal for what he labeled “A Nationwide War On The Sources of Poverty.” Addressing the assembled Congress, Johnson