Mises Search

I enjoyed writing this piece , and especially researching it. I had no idea how late it was when child labor laws became national. I didn’t know that the original agitation came from women’s textile unions. I had no idea that there were so many exceptions in the law (”wreath making”?). I also found that it was an oddly difficult case to make since

Hillary Clinton has explained her view of economics: “I want to get back to the appropriate balance of power between government and the market.” That’s a bit vague so how about a stricter standard: the federal government can only be as large as the largest U.S. company. There are several ways to look at this , but in terms of sales, the winner is

Regular readers know how nuts I am for the novels of Garet Garrett. I can’t even chose among them, they are all so great. To my mind they should be NYT bestsellers. They constitute a major discovery in a hugely important genre: capitalist fiction. I say capitalist but they are not self-consciously so. They are just good stories that put a love of

R.J. Stove, who just completed a one-volume survey of the history of classical music, offers some intriguing observations of how government destroyed serious music: Orwellian bureaucrats, answerable to no one, determined the nature of such new music as would gain official sanction. This was no mere charity for occasional deserving cases, such as

Ron Paul’s Pillars of Prosperity is reviewed here .

Daniel Klein writes to tell us of his new article : Abstract : We have made a complete review of Krugman’s New York Times columns 1997 through 2006--in all, 654 columns. The pattern of policy positions and arguments do not square with his purported concern for general prosperity and the interests of the poor. Some of the evidence lies in

Some emails you learn to take with a grain of salt, and the ones last week about how California had banned homeschooling are a case in point. The hysteria was over the top, and the claims lacked important detail - at least that was my impression and I looked no further. Well, it turns out that this case is a huge deal in the blogosphere, with vast

Reviewed here .

The Mises Institute has consistently favored free trade--the real thing--while criticizing “free-trade agreements” as mercantilism in disguise. The position is a lonely one, except that looking back history we find that the Austrians were against trade agreements from the beginning, even battling as forms of Keynesian planning. So there is a

Posner has some interesting thoughts . What I can’t stand is the incredible, shocking ignorance of those who claim that free market thought in American began with WFB. The Mises Institute has made available vast quantities of books and publications--Nock, Garrett, Flynn, Hazlitt, Mencken, and on and on--that were far better than the stuff you get