Mises Search

Once upon a time, I developed a theory that we have much lower expectations for public-sector performance than we do for private-sector performance. We saw this in accounting standards that — when applied to Enron — resulted in market forces shutting that firm down, while the Department of Defense loses billions of dollars annually. The difference

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue until resisted.” Frederick Douglass I have written here about Alabama’s tax structure in the past,

“On a basic level, a job is the result of the mixing of capital and labor.” Why can’t everyone who wants a job, or a better job, just find one? In a perfect world, this would be the case. Sadly, the recently released employment figures for June indicate that the world in which we live is still far from perfect. Nationally, unemployment still

Do you remember when, Things were really hummin’, Yeaaaah, let’s twist again, Twistin’ time is here! So crooned that 1960s social philosopher, Chubby Checker, hoping to extend the popularity of the dance craze he started in a follow-up song urging the kiddies buying his music to do it again for another year. It was a successful twist on the Twist;

He stood in front of my desk, fidgeting, and avoiding eye contact. This was a necessary but not pleasant conversation. “Look,” I said, “to get a B in the class, you will need to do just a little better on the final than you have so far on your previous tests. But just a little. Remember: Students usually raise their averages on the final exam. You

Thank you, Joseph Stiglitz, for providing so much fodder for free-market economists to use in their classrooms this spring. The fodder can be found in new research (with Bruce Greenwald) Stiglitz is touting . In it, he presents statistical relationships between technological improvements in agriculture and unemployment in the 1930s. He asks, What

Walking home from work the other day, I passed a car parked in front of the English department that I used to chuckle at. It is a grayish sedan with a greenish bumper sticker saying we should thank union labor for the 40-hour work week. My chuckling would be at that car’s owner, who is known as a smart guy on the English faculty and someone who

If you ever visited my part of the country, you would likely hear about a long-standing controversy over occupational taxes and the right of my state’s most populous county to impose them. That state would be Alabama, and that county would be Jefferson County, established through violent, extramarket means in 1819 yet named for an antitax radical

What if the unintended consequences are actually intentional? That’s the thought I had recently upon learning about upcoming Medicare fines on hospitals that readmit patients due to complications within 30 days of an initial discharge. The logic is straightforward: If hospitals do not make a patient well the first time, then they suffer the

Picture a mono-racial New York metropolitan area with a fraction of the murders, if you can. Add in unreadable signs and buildings and infrastructure completed in 1960 or later. Then you might have a picture of Seoul, the capital of the Republic of Korea and, quite possibly, the new center of global capitalism. At least, that is my conclusion