The gym has Fox television on, and perhaps I should be grateful, because otherwise it would not have dawned on me just how popular and widely embraced stupid is. By stupid, I don’t really intend insult. Stupid is a mental outlook that affirms the crude and base while eschewing the noble and thoughtful. It is an attitude of mind that can be adopted
You may have had a sense lately that something is just not right in your domestic life, not calamitously bad but just bad enough to be annoying on a daily basis and in seemingly unpredictable ways. You are not alone. In fact, a huge variety of personal and social problems trace to a single source. First an inventory to establish what I mean: You
Ads like this one make me shudder, mainly because I once thought of myself as a conservative (for both good and bad reasons). The ad runs, “3 Conservative Books for $1 each,” and examples of such conservative books flash by, all of them screaming for blood, exalting the imperial state, decrying the very basis of civilization (peace), and demanding
A Thanksgiving visit to my Texas hometown provokes the question: it is possible to adore the people and enterprising ethics of a place while abhorring its politics of nonchalant imperialism? There are plenty of theoretical problems with combining laissez-faire economics with the belief that the Texas political establishment ought to otherwise run
My order at my favorite Chinese takeout was taking too long. I stopped into the men’s room. There I witnessed a common scene: the modern toilet disaster. An otherwise clean business had a restroom calamity on its hands, one so grim that I hesitate to describe it. The conjectural history is not difficult to reconstruct. The toilet apparently had
A death in the family is always hard, but three in three weeks is especially difficult for children, even though it only involved pets. First it was the green tree frog discovered at the local car repair shop and taken home to be cared for. “Sticky” lived two months, long enough for the kids to become very attached. One day we found him dead in
Everyone has heard something described as a Rube Goldberg machine, and most of us know what this means: some crazy convoluted way of accomplishing a task that would otherwise be quite simple. That’s how Webster’s defines it. The phase most often applies to overly complicated software but it was also applied to the Clinton health care plan and
The Free Market 13, no. 11 (November 1995) In the story of Rumpelstiltskin, an evil dwarf saves the life of a king’s bride by spinning flax into gold. But the price is high for performing this seeming miracle. She must give the dwarf her first-born child. The story could be an allegory for the “micro-credit” movement, the current enthusiasm of
The Free Market 13, no. 12 (December 1995) Washington agencies pay private-sector clipping services so senior management can know who their friends and enemies are. Journalists who write negatively about, say, the BATF, immediately enter the agency’s sights. Even if nothing is done with the information, the knowledge that it’s being collected
The Free Market 14, no. 2 (February 1996) Middle-class incomes, the core of what we call the “standard of living,” have been falling for more than two decades. Though people have known this intuitively, only recently have we heard much about it. Economists and the media have been conditioned to look for the ups and downs in the business cycle,
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.
