I was just astonished at fruit prices this morning at the local grocer. The clerk explained to me that all the prices of regionally grown fruit are going up up up, and it is likely to get worse. Why is this? We had a freeze in April. In April, in the Deep South! It seems that the entire peach and apple crops were wiped out, and people are in a
I was amazed that when Muhammad Yunus, head of the state-supported, quasi-socialist, regimentation-promoting Grameen Bank, received his Nobel Prize that free-market commentators bought into the propaganda. They threw their hats in the air, and their brains too. It reminded me of how conservatives all lauded Jack Kemp’s program for “home ownership”
It might be May Day in Cuba--the day on which Castro gives his traditional 4–5 hour speech, or so says NPR with exuberant expectation—but at the Mises Institute, it is Benjamin Anderson day. He was born on May 1, 1886. He was an outstanding economist who first drew Hazlitt’s attention to the Austrian School with his book The Value of Money . His
Harvey Mansfield, writing in the Wall Street Journal , slaps together one of the strangest and most circuitous defenses of executive tyranny I’ve ever read. From his perspective, the case for abolishing the rule of law is in the tradition of Aristotle, Locke, Hamilton, Madison, Tocqueville, and a few others. His prose is so unencumbered honest
Michael Tanner, reviewing the Republican debates the other night , just assumes without question that Reagan is the standard bearer, even though his submitted budgets were always higher than what a Democratic Congress would approve and his welfare spending set records that were bested only by his successors. Most annoying is Tanner’s dismissal of
Now, here is a famous environmental activist who is serious about the global warming problem . “We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion.... We need to stop burning fossil fuels and utilize only wind, water, and solar power with all generation of power coming from individual or small community units
The Anniston Star reports a flood of letters to its offices about its editorial that blamed the Mises Institute for the lack of barber regulation in Alabama. But the paper isn’t backing down. It says that “regulation and private business aren’t incompatible.” Ironically, the paper cites a case a regulated industry, funeral homes, and how those
My article here elicited more correspondence than any in memory. Many people are just shocked at the idea that IP is contrary to market economics. The idea strikes people as obviously nuts and yet once people start thinking about it, wondering why precisely they support IP, it becomes more difficult because the rationales don’t actually hold up
Ever think that the anti-capitalism of the press is exaggerated or non-existent? Check out this incredible story at MSNBC/Newsweek . You would never know, never even guess, that China was the home to a murderous tyrant only a few decades ago (est. 40 million dead), and you would certainly never guess that China has gone from vast impoverishment to
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.
