Mises Search

Government rail buffs, bureaucrats, and the friends of big government are resting easy these days. The big bad Amtrak Reform Council, which was charged with cleaning up the mess created by almost 32 years of government passenger railroad system, turned out to be nothing more than a cute little poodle. The council offered no radical privatization

The official credo of government regulators ought to be: “The more we screw up, the more of us you’re going to pay for.” Who taught me this lesson in civics? Recently, I attended the Security Traders Association (STA) congressional conference in Washington. The buzz at the conference was about Enron and the failures of the United States Securities

As one reads the latest volume in Robert Caro’s landmark biographical series of Lyndon Baines Johnson, one thinks of Lord Acton and F.A. Hayek. Acton--the friend of the South who described its struggle in the Civil War as the Second War of American Independence--once wrote that great men are usually evil men. Clearly, if one is to measure the

This article is excerpted from Gregory Bresiger’s large monograph, The Revolution of 1935: The Secret History of Social Security , published in the Mises Institute series Essays in Political Economy. A second American revolution occurred almost 70 years ago. On August 14, 1935, after very little public or congressional debate, President Franklin

Harvey Pitt should just give up. Once again, our government is pursuing a futile quest. The idea of regulation has never and will never work effectively. Still, the regulators always say we need more of them, despite a record of failure as enviable and consistent as that of the Chicago Cubs or the pathetic New York City Board of Education. It is

A small park in the middle of Manhattan stands out at first sight.  It appears to be cleaner. No matter the time of day one goes for a stroll there, one always seems to come across people cleaning up the place. There are restaurants and sandwich shops doing a brisk business in this park, which is behind the New York Public Library. This little

What the terrorists didn’t do to New York, the politicians will.  Mayor Michael Bloomberg recently signed an 18 percent real estate tax increase into law. This was designed to close the city’s $5 billion dollar budget gap, a remarkable amount of red ink given that the city’s bloated budget is some $42 billion. The Republican mayor was determined

Arthur Levitt is frustrated.  He should be. Even by his own admission, Levitt, who held the chairmanship of the SEC longer than anyone else, wasn’t able to catch many of the so-called bad guys that regulators are supposed to nab. Maybe there’s another reason for the regulatory problems. Levitt, whose book entertainingly rampages through most of

The Queens Library System boasts of having one of the largest systems in the nation. But just because a unit of government is big doesn’t mean it is efficient, as I have seen in years of borrowing books from this badly run system. Our large, unaccountable library system proved to me, once again, that the public sector fails at just about

Last year the New York City Subway system carried 1.41 billion passengers. In 1947, the historic high point of ridership, the system carried 2.02 billion. That means the latest numbers constitute an incredible falloff of some 30% in a city whose population has stayed about the same over the past 60 years. This is a remarkable vote of No Confidence