[Forbes.com, August 2011] What do you do when life hands you lemons? If you’re about to say “make lemonade,” make sure you have a permit first or you might get an unwelcome visit from a government official. Last Saturday was Lemonade Freedom Day , which is a protest against governments shutting down — wait for it — kids’ lemonade stands. You’ve
“We have already had this conversation. The 20th century was a long (and bloody) debate about alternative modes of social organization.” Somewhere, there are two graduate students in the social sciences who need dissertation topics. Those students should be watching the Occupy Wall Street movement with keen eyes, because, as it evolves, it’s
A reader has brought to my attention the fact that the second graph in my Daily Article from 6/2 (”Public and Private Welfare Expenditures as Percentage of GDP and Gini Coefficient, 1980-1994”) suggests that private expenditure on welfare was 14% of GDP in 1994. This is clearly an error; there is still an upward trend, but the numbers have been
Here’s a question, paraphrased from Charles Calomiris via Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce : would those who protest globalization and the steady march of economic freedom change their minds if they were convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that the globalization, economic growth, and economic freedom they’re
I can’t even bring myself to comment on this : The mounting iPhone 4 controversy has hit a receptive ear in Washington, as Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D., N.Y.) Thursday wrote to Mr. Jobs urging Apple to come up with a “permanent fix” to the problem at no cost to customers. Mr. Schumer asked Apple to provide customers with a clearly written
As part of an ongoing series of papers about Walmart, Big Box retail, and economic change, I’m reading a lot of criticism of big companies that pay low wages and offer skimpy benefits. For Walmart’s critics, this is pretty easy to explain. Some argue that this is part and parcel of the capitalist mode of production. Like every other capitalist
To be added to the list here : 1. The purpose of economic activity is to create employment, not goods and services. 2. Firms’ efforts to increase quality or lower costs are the results of psychological
“I don’t think that’s very good for your blood pressure.” I was sitting on the couch feeding our newborn while my wife was bathing our two-year-old. I had flipped through the channels and had stopped on PBS, where someone was talking about how payday lenders were exploiting the poor. Liberalization: Age of Milton Friedman, also Peter Leeson’s
I recently printed a small mountain of papers for my ongoing research projects about Walmart. One thing this illustrates is just how little we actually know about what we might claim to understand and be able to plan. In our papers on Walmart, Charles Courtemanche and I have estimated the effects of Walmart expansion (measured several ways) on
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.