Gates taking a seat in your den : Q: In recent years, there’s been a lot of people clamoring to reform and restrict intellectual-property rights. It started out with just a few people, but now there are a bunch of advocates saying, “We’ve got to look at patents, we’ve got to look at copyrights.” What’s driving this, and do you think
At the barbershop, I sat down to the house computer and found it unusable, crammed with spyware/adware with no obvious way to run a program to clean it. After speding an hour with the machine and realizing it would take another few before it was clean, I began to ask questions about how it became this way. Well, it turns out that this is the
Nick Gillespie at Reason is “not a raving fan of Social Security ‘privatization’ for a number of reasons. Among them: I don’t like the idea of forced savings, period; to the extent that SS taxes go into the general fund and subsidize guaranteed state pensions/minimum incomes, they should be named as such; the amount of money under any plan that
Kevin Brancato at Truck&Barter posts a few paragraphs from his dissertation that deal with Mises and index numbers. “No aprioristic theory exists to determine the exact outcomes of changes in law that apply to the economic system. In fact, Mises is fine with data, as long as you are not trying to construct economic theory out of it. If one is
It seems that the FBI can’t get its $170 million computer system to work right . So of course it will spend $2 million to evaluate the problems. While this evaluation takes place, “the bulk of the internal reports and documents produced at the F.B.I. must still be printed, signed and scanned by hand into computer format each
There’s something strange about this article in the Washington Times , linked by FEE this morning. It has the promising title of “Tax Burden Shift Seen as Lopsided” and it does complain that the rich are paying too much: good point. But the substance of the quotes from DC conservatives is not that the rich are overpaying but rather that the poor
For all those who have followed the Hoppe controversy, it is a good time to listen to his complete lecture on “ Time Preference and Its Implications “ delivered at the Mises University. It is thorough, brilliant, innovative, and even funny: clearly a danger to conventional ways of thinking. Here are many more Hoppe lectures
A fascinating and all-too-brief perspective on the economics of rebates, from Robert Frasca at Division of Labour : tax avoidance as the real reason for this largely annoying institution: Rebates turn customers into creditors. If it is cheaper to borrow from customers than from financial markets, then it is efficient for the company to offer
The Gringrich generation of Republicans wasn’t all it was cracked up to be when elected, but thanks to this New York Times analysis we know even more: the remaining members have become the source of the problem, having gone from cutters to big spenders. Compare the results of political markets with those of free enterprise: what would happen to a
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.
