Mises Search

The Patriot Act that was rammed through after the September 2001 attacks was one of the more egregious blows against liberty in our lifetimes. It shredded core rights and liberties that had been taken for granted for centuries. Liberties are never lost all at once, but the Patriot Act, as disgusting in its details as in its name and the rhetoric

Here’s the problem. If you give government a job to do, even one that seems justified in the abstract, it will use its power to make a terrible mess in practice. This is true in a host of areas from welfare to warfare, but it is even true in the complicated area of immigration. Just imagine this. The owners of Chuy’s Mesquite Broiler in Phoenix

[Foreword to the second edition of The Case for Gold (2011)]   This country had the chance to avoid the disastrous meltdown of 2008 and following, the one that has led to the nationalization of industries, the creation of oceans of paper money, and the destruction of so many American dreams. The answer that might have been is the one you hold in

Governments and their intellectual front men believe that nothing unites a population like a war. Actually, that’s not quite true. What happens is that during war, governments strike fear into their domestic opponents and silence them through intimidation. The appearance of unity is wholly illusory. If you truly want to unite a population, here is

The news of the Supreme Court decision on Walmart — declining to approve a massive lawsuit against an amazing company — was reported as if it amounted to some devastating blow to American life. Nonsense: the decision actually permits normalcy in economic development to proceed without a new round of destruction of wealth. Some lawyers might be

Lefties have protested against Chiquita Banana for so long that most activists probably forget why they are supposed to hate the company. The company does have a spotty history, especially when it was United Fruit. For decades after the turn of the 20th century, US military interventions in Latin America were inspired by the goal of protecting

The violence perpetuated by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway unleashed the usual torrent of blaming anyone who might have influenced the murderer’s thought. He was first described as a right-wing Christian — a description designed to put a certain community on notice. As more evidence rolled in, he has been more accurately described as an

The trigger that apparently caused the market meltdown was the ever-so-slight suggestion from Standard & Poor’s that the US government’s fiscal health might not be all it’s cracked up to be. This was not a case of the little boy noting the emperor has no clothes. It is more like the little boy suggesting that the emperor’s clothes, while

President Obama has pulled back on imposing new “air quality” regulations. The regulations would have hobbled many industries and created many spillover effects. The Republicans have estimated costs as high as $90 billion, but they are just saying that to provide a sound bite. They supported such things under Nixon and Bush. There is no real way

Hardly anyone talks of the table of virtues and vices anymore — which includes the Seven Deadly Sins — but in reviewing them, we find that they nicely sum up the foundation of bourgeois ethics, and provide a solid moral critique of the modern state. Now, libertarians don’t often talk about virtues and vices, mainly because we agree with Lysander