The Free Market 14, no. 3 (March 1995) The government always wants more of our money, and too many economists are ready to make the case for surrendering our last dime. During the budget hysteria of 1990, for example, many economists claimed that the government needed to raise taxes to balance the budget. Anyone who disagreed was supposedly
The Free Market 14, no. 6 (March 1996) In 1984, at a Mises Institute conference in Houston, some of us met O.P. Alford, III, for the first time. He was a quiet gentleman dressed in unassuming khaki trousers and shirt. His intelligence was evident and his manners were strikingly aristocratic. Those who visited with him that weekend noticed
The Free Market 14, no. 4 (April 1996) Should free enterprise stop at the border? Of course not, and the attempt to make it so can drive us to ruin. Yet politicians are hammering free trade. Long-refuted myths are back in full force, and the voters are getting a miseducation in the economics of autarky. The politicians criticizing free trade are
The Free Market 14, no. ( 1996) The Federal Reserve is the most powerful yet least questioned of all Washington institutions. It can make or break elections, bail out entire governments, send the stock market to the stratosphere, or bankrupt whole industries. Yet it operates with less oversight than the CIA. In the past, politicians have only
The Free Market 14, no. 6 (June 1996) “Every great statesman must necessarily fail,” wrote Andrew Lytle in a moving tribute to John C. Calhoun. The reason: the statesman is driven by high ideals like freedom, self-government, justice, and constitutionalism, which will never be perfectly realized. Yet even in failure, the statesman preserves
The Free Market 14, no. 7 (July 1996) A year ago January—what a moment!—the two parties were in a tax cut bidding war. Each side was attempting to gain political advantage by trumping the other guy’s proposal. Everything was on the table: capital gains tax cuts, income tax cuts, inheritance tax cuts, and every manner of tax credit. Suddenly,
The Free Market 14, no. 8 (August 1996) In a truly free society, it wouldn’t matter who the president was. We wouldn’t have to vote or pay attention to debates. We could ignore campaign commercials. There would be no high stakes for ourselves, our families, or the country. Liberty and property would be so secure that we could curse him, love
The Free Market 14, no. 9 (September 1996) In a state-funded education system, bad ideas live longer than they would in a free market. That’s the best explanation for the staying power of the two opposing errors of our time: nihilism and pseudo-omniscience in the social sciences. Nihilism comes in the form of postmodernism, a pretentious body of
The Free Market 14, no. 10 (October 1996) The good news is that supply-siders want to cut taxes. The bad news is...well, let’s accentuate the positive for the moment. The supply-siders reject Washington’s tendency to think in static terms. To most politicians and bureaucrats, the economy is a pie for the tax collectors and special interests to
The Free Market 14, no. 11 (November 1996) It’s a myth that the Federal Reserve is independent of politics. It’s a lie so brazen, in fact, that it’s fit only for Fed press releases. Every administration, to take just one example, tries to get the Fed chairman to time monetary policy so as to insure its reelection. Fed chairmen will play along,
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.
