Mises Search

Samuel Clemens was an old-style liberal of the 19th century sort who believed in economic liberty and warned about the depredations of state power. The failure of many critics to understand the old liberal perspective may be part of the reason his political outlook is so widely misunderstood. His liberalism is woven into the fabric of his most

What a difference a decade can make. Had Ridley Scott’s film Kingdom of Heaven — which portrays the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in the 12th century between the second and third crusade — come out ten years ago, the film and its message would have looked very different and far less plausible than it looks now. The Scott film leaves you with a

Everyone knows the rule: drink no liquor before noon. How insufferable such advice is! It has caused morning drinkers to hide their habits, deny them when confronted, and otherwise feel like they are doing something wrong or immoral or socially intolerable, a combination which leads to other forms of pathology. It is time for them to stand up and

You know why so many men walk around with sloppy hair? We hate haircuts. You have to drive there to get one, which represents decline, because if you know about Figaro from Rossini’s “Barber of Seville,” the barber came to your home (but then he also pulled out your teeth and passed on furtive notes arranging encounters of various sort, etc.). In

There’s a sense these days that anyone would favor a pie over a cake, and I think I know why. Pies don’t tempt household cooks to scrimp on ingredients. That’s why pies generally taste better. If it’s apples, it’s apples, and most people don’t think a half a cup of sugar in something is “too much.” So it is for lemon and blueberry and a host of

Look, I’m the last guy to trash a consumer product. I’m disinclined to blast the manufacturers of a beloved bathroom gel as deceivers who make money off people’s ignorance and perpetuate the problem they are supposedly solving, or charlatans who deliberately hook people on some chemically produced gunk solely for the sake of profiting from

I’m trying to order a hamburger, medium well, but the cook was involved in heated argument with the customer who was insisting that DSL is better and faster than cable for a home internet connection. “Man, DSL rocks!” “You are crazy. DSL ain’t nothing. Cable’s bandwidth rocks!” “You are paying for nothing. You can’t download nothing on cable!” And

Remember those silly days in the 1990s, when Clinton, Gore, and their friends cobbled together our money to put computers in every classroom and community center? The hope was that the computer would at last do what the government has so far been unable to do after a century of work: make every child literate and high-minded. It turned out that

Based on correspondence from this piece on kids and the web , the number-one issue that makes parents reluctant about the web is its red-light district. Well, let me cut to the chase: K9webprotection is a free program that solves the problem, and better than any of the others I’ve tried. A household with computers and kids has no excuse not to

Every evening was a magic evening in the household of Mrs. Rede, who lived across the street and made fresh flour tortillas for dinner every day, in her kitchen that smelled of cumin and peppers, and in which hung a captivating Aztec calendar that enticed me with pagan charms. There was no rolling pin anywhere in sight. She would mix up the