The art of economics consists of looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. If you want to know where American supporters of free markets learned economics, take a look at Economics in One Lesson by Henry
The Free Market 21, no. 1 (January 2003) Many of the same people who debunked Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, and ridiculed its failures, are enthusiastically backing George W. Bush’s War on Terror. Both are big-government programs. Why back one and not the other? Left-liberals say that the job of the state is to bring about fairness and
The Free Market 21, no. 3 (March 2003) Consider what the business press doesn’t tell you. Just looking at the conventional data, we are still in the thick of the longest period of economic doldrums in the postwar period. I use the word doldrums because somehow the word recession is out of favor. Instead, in Alan Greenspan’s notorious phrase we
The Free Market 21, no. 4 (April 2003) Economies tank for big reasons and small, but usually both. The current stagnation was prompted by investment imbalances created in the late 1990s that needed to be liquidated. But it is being made worse by a thousand bad policies, some of which are being aided by those seeking to “stimulate the economy,”
The Free Market 21, no.4 (April 2003) Lecturing at the London School of Economics from 1931 to 1950, F.A. Hayek was nicely positioned to counter the rising influence of J.M. Keynes. Keynes’s new vision of macroeconomics was a resurrection of old fallacies but with a modern twist: an open call for a consolidated state to manage investment. More
The Free Market 21, no. 6 (June 2003) “The enemy we’re fighting is a bit different from the one we had war-gamed against,” said General William Wallace after the first week of fighting in Iraq had not gone as planned. The comment speaks to a truth of which we are reminded in wartime: the military is a government operation that undertakes its
The Free Market 23, no. 7 (July 2003) The extent to which we are secure in our homes, property, and the places we shop is due in large part to the commercial marketplace. It is the free market that makes available alarm systems, locks, fences, cameras, security services, and in purchasing these items we are free to make a choice among
The Free Market 23, no. 8 (August 2003) If you stuck a dollar in a savings jar in 1913 and tried to spend it today, you would find your purchasing power had been sapped. Your dollar would be worth about a nickel. What happened? Well, the government had created an institution called a central bank that was endowed with the power to create money.
The Free Market 23, no. 9 (September 2003) F rom time immemorial, monetary statists have proposed what they believed to be the final answer to the problem of currency instability: a world central bank and world currency. This is what Keynes dreamed of when he was instrumental in creating the IMF. And as Ron Paul has long warned, the creation of
The Free Market 23, no. 10 (October 2003) H ow well I recall the debates about the WTO and Nafta , both of which the Mises Institute editorialized against on grounds that they constituted managed trade, not free trade. In the case of Nafta , it was outright regional protectionism. But for dissenting from both sides of the phony DC debate, we
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.
