Private pensions in this country date back more than 100 years, that is to say, to a time when most people didn’t live long enough to collect them. Nowadays Americans take living comfortably to 75 and beyond to be an entitlement. Not that longevity in itself is something to complain about, but it does have a few downsides—like a gradually sinking
It’s become a common refrain: American workers are badly overworked, driven to a loss of leisure, sleep and possibly sanity by their material and status obsessions. By instead emulating the Europeans, we would be better rested, more productive, and have more time for family and other relationships. That’s been a semi-official slice of conventional
The April 20 explosion and subsequent round-the-clock oil spill from a BP-operated deepwater drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico 40 miles off the Louisiana coast has generated justifiable anger across the nation. It’s also generated calls for strict sanctions against BP, the most drastic of which is confiscation of all company assets. The front
The Free Market 14, no. 3 (March 1996) The joy erupting in Howard University’s student union was palpably motivated; O.J. Simpson would walk. “As the verdict was read, the place erupted into screaming and jumping. You couldn’t hear,” one observer put it. To the students, a falsely accused black man was able to get justice—in racist America, no
The Free Market 14, no. 9 (September 1996) Now in its seventh year, the school voucher experiment in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is held up as a model for the nation. But the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program has found itself fighting its own track record as much as the city’s public school establishment. The early cascade of hurrahs has slowed in
The Free Market 19, no. 4 (April 2001) Religious social services soon may be getting a new ally in their efforts to rescue people from the clutches of poverty, drug addiction and other personal problems: the federal government. The hook is “compassionate conservatism,” and as the linchpin of President Bush’s domestic policy, stand-and-deliver
The Free Market 20, no. 8 (August 2002) P.T. Bauer passed away this spring most likely never having attended a U2 concert. But the eminent English economist had known many people like the Irish superband’s lead singer, Paul Hewson , aka Bono Vox. “Many supporters of official foreign aid,” he wrote more than 20 years ago, “are genuinely and
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.