Not that it will make any difference in the final choice, nor should it, but the Cato Institute is accepting public nominations for the highly remunerative Friedman Prize. On the other hand, there is Rothbard’s Unraveling Milton Friedman , which argues: One of Friedman’s most disastrous deeds was the important role he proudly played, during
News : “Several nations, including Chile, Mexico, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, halted U.S. beef imports within hours after the Agriculture Department announced Tuesday that a cow at a farm near Yakima, Wash., had tested positive for the brain-wasting disease. Japan is the largest overseas market for U.S. beef.” There’s more to these swift
Richard Hastings asks what the world would be like without Wal-Mart, and argues that the company’s critics entirely miss the point. “The world’s middle class is changing, partly due to Wal-Mart’s large buying capacity for consumer electronics, toys, bicycles, sports and recreational gear like fishing gear, shooting sports, and camping—activities
The truth about smokeless tobacco is reported by Jacob Sullum : “Like chewing nicotine gum or wearing a nicotine patch, using smokeless tobacco does not involve inhaling combustion products, the main source of smoking-related hazards. Oral cancer is the only well-established life-threatening danger associated with smokeless tobacco, and even that
Sent out by James Hess on Hayek-L , this article by Kristian Williams in the December 2003 issue of the Monthly Review is a fascinating re-reading of the history of the rise of local police: “Despite its initial plausibility, the idea that the police were invented in response to an epidemic of crime is, to be blunt, exactly wrong. Furthermore,
The US government has gone from forbidding guns on plans (9-11 terrorists surely knew that) to making armed air marshals mandatory for international flights in US airspace, which suggests a slogan for the US regulatory state: whatever is not forbidden is required for everyone in the world.
Stephen Evans writing for the BBC draws attention to a point often lost in all the discussion of Wal-Mart, globalization, and the claim that the marketplace is somehow making all places and things homogeneous. In fact, the global marketplace is broadening the market for niches and highly specialized tastes. ”One of the great boons of the internet
Rupert Darwall, writing the Telegraph , offers a good summary of Mises’s “economic calculation” argument bureaucracy. Darwall’s piece on British health care bureaucracies is a rare example of an op-ed that actually explains why government services don’t work, even when reformed with targets and goals and other public-sector, good-governnment
“In a sense we are determinists and in another sense we can’t let ourselves be,” says Milton Friedman in a Matt Miller piece in the Boston Globe . “But you can’t really justify free will.” (Thanks to margrev for the pointer.) Here is Mises on the subject of free will : The determinists are right in asserting that everything that happens is the
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.
