Every time I take off my shoes in the security screening process at the airport, I find it consoling to remind myself that at least Richard Reid wasn’t wearing an underwear bomb. We take off our shoes because Reid, a delusional British malcontent, was caught trying to light an explosive device in his shoes on a Paris-to-Miami flight a few days
See this BBC “ Photo Journal “ on the San Pedro Prison in La Paz, where there are no guards or metal bars on cell windows. Inmates, who can live wih their children, have to pay for their cells with money earned from jobs in the prison economy. Some sell groceries, work in food stalls, hotels, or restaurants, while others work as hairdressers,
You go to the supermarket and stock up a week’s groceries. Steak and roast and chicken and fruits and vegetables. You love those Del Monte canned plums, so you grab a couple of cans of them, too. The can says plums. Therefore, you trust plums, not pickled oriental eggs are in the opaque tin can. You get to the checkout counter and an absolute
In recent essays in Roll Call and the Wall Street Journal , Cong. Jim Cooper of Tennessee is pointing out that Standard & Poor’s is projecting that by 2012, the U.S. Treasury bond will lose its AAA rating, and that by 2025, it will fall to junk
The events in recent months in Venezuela provide a textbook example of statolatry —the term popularized by Ludwig von Mises in Omnipotent Government about tendencies to make government and its figureheads objects of veneration. This week’s Economist magazine reports (in an article on Hugo Chávez efforts to form a socialist ruling coalition in
This morning’s New York Times reports on the growing trend of outsourcing government activities via contracting duties to private firms. The result is an increasingly common accounting trick, in which the state can expand its activities while both reducing its size and increasing the scope of activities that occur without public scrutiny. And like
The Free Market 20, no. 9 (September 2002) The Enron scandal fueled the drive for campaign finance reform well enough for a campaign finance reform (CFR) bill to get signed into law. However, immediately after this occurred, various interest groups presented legal challenges to the new legislation based on its questionable compliance with the
The Free Market 32, no. 4 (April 2014) One of my favorite economists in the history of economic thought is the great Austrian, Carl Menger (1840–1921). While the mainstream of the economics profession acknowledges Menger’s place due to his contribution to the Marginalist Revolution in the 1870s, it otherwise ignores him because his theoretical
This new paper from Economic Inquiry provides a new meaning to Harry Truman’s famous desire for a one-armed economist: ATTEMA, A. E., BROUWER, W. B.F. and VAN EXEL, J. (2013), YOUR RIGHT ARM FOR A PUBLICATION IN AER?. Economic Inquiry. doi: 10.1111/ecin.12013 Abstract : The time tradeoff (TTO) method is popular in medical decision making for
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.
