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George W. Bush, our shadow president, has dropped another bombshell, announcing that the Republicans in Congress concentrate too much on economics to the exclusion of social issues like education. There’s more to life than the economy, he said, and if we elect him, he will help us see this truth. His comments are the latest in a long stream of

In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order demanding that any American holding gold was to turn it over to the banks and the government. In 1999, a Federal Reserve has floated official has floated the idea of doing the same thing (in effect) to paper dollars. It’s proof that the economic ignorance and disregard for liberty is

Thank goodness this bloody century, the era of communism, national socialism, fascism, and central planning—in short, the century of government worship—is coming to an end. May we use the occasion to re-pledge our allegiance to human freedom, which is the basis of prosperity and civilization itself, and to repudiate every ideological force that

You know that box on your tax form that tries to get you to give $3 to federal elections? Checking it, says the form, sends your tax dollars to politicians running for president. Doing so doesn’t mean that you will pay more. Do it in the public interest, we are instructed. The system was adopted in the early 1970s, and initially the numbers

To understand the WTO requires this counter-intuitive insight: while purporting to advance free trade, it is actually its major threat. In the past, the loopy social reformers lobbying and protesting outside the WTO’s Seattle meetings had no forum and certainly no mechanism to use to advance their pet causes. The creation of the WTO in 1995, a

Thank Heaven the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization closed with absolutely nothing accomplished. Indeed, the delegates are glad just to leave the city in one piece. As to when and where the next meeting of this global bureaucracy will take place, no one knows for sure. We’d all be better off -- indeed the cause of free trade would be

The Clinton administration wasn’t content with blowing up a pharmacy in the Sudan; now it wants to blow up hundreds of them on the web. The plan is to give the Food and Drug Administration massive new investigative powers to hamper online sales of prescription drugs. The proposed legislation would impose penalties of half a million dollars per

Two front-page events from this last week would appear to have nothing in common: 1) the merger of America Online and Time Warner, 2) and a huge South Carolina rally in defense of the Confederate flag and Southern rights. In fact, they have this crucial commonality: both are glorious signs that the nation-state as we know it is coming to an end.

[This speech was delivered at the Mises Institute’s History of Liberty Conference on January 29, 2000, in Auburn, Alabama.] The memoirs of the indefatigable economist Ludwig von Mises, written from his exile in Geneva in 1940, contain this moving, even tragic, passage: “Occasionally I entertained the hope that my writings would bear practical

The new Sacagawea dollar coin is an offense, starting with its color. It is supposed to summon the memory of the gold standard, when the dollar was something besides a government-issue piece of paper. Money was just another name for a real commodity that facilitated exchange and held its value independent of government’s blessing. Liberty thrived