[Chapter 8, live blog] All popular business histories are replete with lies. Or to be more charitable, they are filled with untruths based on a stupid version of cause and effect: inventions happen because people take out a patent on them. This assumption is hardly ever questioned in the mainline literature. Writers look through patent records and
Several people have sent a link to this post on the Time Magazine effort to push national service. In an addition to violating liberties on a massive scale, this program would be a colossal waste. It will rob young people of their most important years early in life, taking them out of productive work and making them less able to offer anything to
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
“They called him the Gorilla - the brawler known as the scariest man on Wall Street,” writes the Times about Dick Fuld, head of Lehman, and the story tells of his rise and fall. Most striking is this portrait posted outside Lehman offices for staff to post their comments on. Click here to see the picture and see the comment right above his head:
From Pillars of Prosperity, a speech from September 10, 2003 ( PDF and Hardcopy ) One of the major government privileges granted to GSEs is a line of credit with the United States Treasury. According to some estimates, the line of credit may be worth over $2 billion. This explicit promise by the Treasury to bail out GSEs in times of economic
Here is the howler printed yesterday, in reference to the prospect of bank nationalization: “This regime change refers to a change in the economic environment so radical that, at least for a while, economic policy makers will need to suspend what are usually sacred principles: minimal interference in free markets, gradualism and predictability.”
[Live blog part 3, chapter 3] Against Intellectual Monopoly dares step out front, on a topic very dear to our hearts, to prove that “the great role of patents in giving us modern software is unadulterated fantasy.” And they show this by reviewing the history of software innovation and its present workings. Neither Google nor Youtube nor any other
A wonderful Wall Street Journal profile of Blaise Agüera y Arcas, the architect behind the most advanced features of Bing Maps, explains how he is working toward features that allow users to upload high-resolution images inside of buildings to match with seamless maps to create integrated virtual realities – a dramatic step beyond Google Maps.
As part of my ongoing series on the small ways government wrecks our lives, I’ve been getting floods of correspondence from business people who tell amazing stories of the most idiotic regulations that are slowly ruining their lives. I receive dozens of these every day, and I’m astounded at how the details are not even published in an accessible
This is a strangely fascinating film from a streetcar in San Francisco 1905, before the earthquake, that illustrates what it means for an order to emerge out of seeming chaos. There are a thousand accidents waiting to happen that do not happen, namely because of rational individual planning and self interest. In some ways, it is a beautiful image
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.
