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The stories are now legendary: internet hotshots going from riches to rags in a period of months, infallible stock-pickers with their reputations in tatters, and stock prices of established companies off 75 percent from their highs. The business press is now talking openly about the possibility that the bull market is over. We may be in for a long

Microsoft, one of the great success stories in the history of American enterprise, has spent hundreds of millions to defend itself against claim that it is violating anti-trust law. That’s the price you pay for growing big through market success in the land of free enterprise. But just as that absurd suit is burning itself out, particularly with

Sometimes it’s painful to read the business press, and never more so than during an economic slump. Reporters flail about for explanations. They quote stock analysts, politicians, day traders, other journalists, and even, from time to time, academic economists. But they never seem to arrive at anything approaching an explanation. And what,

Frederic Bastiat was a French economist, a passionate and articulate believer in free enterprise, who lived from 1801 to 1850. But his writings speak to us today, and help explain why the recent conflict with China has ended through diplomacy and peace rather than belligerence and war. The answer can be summed up in one word: commerce. Glorious,

In economics, people often mix up cause and effect. Observe, for example, that both wages and labor market regulations have increased for most of this century. Did the laws and court decisions cause wages to rise? Or did wages rise despite the interventions; might they be even higher without regulation? Adopting the view that government can

Webvan, the cockamamie scheme to provide groceries over the Internet, has gone belly-up. Maybe that was in the cards regardless, but it is a paradigmatic case. Owners of dot-com stock funds regret ever having heard of the Internet.  Webmasters who dropped out of school to get rich quick are crawling back to their guidance counselors to be

The political and ideological forces that gave rise to Bolshevism at the turn of the century are similarly inspiring the movement that looted and burned last month in Genoa, and, before that in Quebec City, Davos, and Seattle. The experience of both causes shows how violent fanatics can gain a political stronghold, and influence the course of

[This column is dedicated to the memory of the friends and associates of the Mises Institute who died at the hands of the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center. It was originally published on September 11, 2001.]   “At the World Trade Center, the brotherhood of man was an everyday affair.” The sight of New York City’s twin World Trade

Suddenly, after the attack, all of our wealth and all of our freedoms are up for grabs, and not only by foreign terrorists, but by our own government and its uncritical cheerleaders. Is there a limit to how much liberty can be compromised in the name of security? How much spending Congress should authorize? How much money and credit the Federal

It is conceivable that stocks might have come back after September 11, just as so many people had hoped. But the meddlers in DC seemed to be doing everything in their power to make sure that it would not happen. As a result, the government has compounded the destruction wrought by the terrorists, and added to the economic miseries of the moment.