You are uptown in a shopping district of a small community, and you pass by the meat shop, the wine shop, the coffee shop, two churches side by side, a coin shop, an antique store and hold it right there. A coin shop? This is irresistible, because, as implausible as this may sound, all political truth can be found in a coin shop. And not just
In my hometown, the peace rallies are always sponsored by the Unitarians. Actually, it is they who are the participants too. This is not a highly heterogeneous group. In fact, you know them already: highly educated, ideologically driven according to conventional left-wing moorings, attracted to fashionable causes like global warming and the mortal
It’s a suburban neighborhood, on Sunday morning. There is a three-way stop at which hardly anyone ever goes the other direction than the main one. But you often see a police car in the nearby parking lot, keeping his sharp eye out for evil lawbreakers. These are the dangerous criminals who slow down almost to a full stop that causes the car to
Barack Obama’s tax advisers recently posted a piece in the Wall Street Journal about their candidate’s tax plans. Their article was designed to triangulate, painting their candidate as a tax cutter and the Republican opposition as a secret tax raiser. It was well written and well argued — not that you can really trust anything you read about what
The events on Wall Street, the collapse of Lehman and the selling off of Merrill, are magnificent and inspiring events. What we see here are examples of sweeping and fundamental change taking place, a huge upheaval that affects the whole of society, and toward the better, since what we have going on here is a massive reallocation of resources away
It was the year 1600 and coffee had become wildly popular all over Europe, just as it had been popular all over the Muslim world since its discovery 900 years earlier. The sitting pope was Clement VIII. His advisers urged him to do something to stop the coffee mania then spreading across Christendom. He tasted the coffee, reflected on its
The second major error that people make is not exclusive to the digital problem but afflicts all institutions. They assume a fixed market for their product and forget their evangelical aims. Lew has never made this mistake. As I mentioned, he began with virtually no market at all. The educational efforts created something out of nothing. Following
One of the fatalities of publishing at a rocket pace is that some amazing treasures get overlooked. So this column, perhaps the first of a series, covers some titles in the Mises Store that have not received much attention in the praiseworthy swirl of mania over Rothbard’s Mystery of Banking and America’s Great Depression , and Mises’s Causes of
These are times when you just feel like yelling at the people who write the news, particular the business press. They are happy to report, word for word, what the Fed and Treasury Department, and their message is always the same: hey, it’s not our fault; in fact, we are fixing the problem! We are told that the economy has tanked because foreigners
[This memorial for Henry Hazlitt originally appeared in The Free Market , September 1993, Volume 11, Number 9.] Old Right journalist Garet Garrett described the New Deal as a revolution against America’s tradition of private property, limited government, and the rule of law. Indeed, it had all the earmarks. President Roosevelt ran against
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.
