The Free Market 13, no. 12 (December 1995) As Victorian England produced the classic Christmas literary work, Dickens’s A Christmas Carol , 20th-century America has made its distinctive contribution: the Christmas movie. Unfortunately, this genre has continued Dickens’s contrast of the Christmas spirit with the bottom-line heartlessness of
The Free Market 14, no. 2 (February 1996) There aren’t many such businesses left, but you can still find traces. Walk (or, more prudently, drive) along 125th St. in Harlem, and you will see Philip Blick’s Hardware, Ida’s Costumers, Lazarus Clothes, Dr. Goldin’s Dental Offices, Benjamin Furs, and Dr. Irving Benjamin, Optometrist. Langsam and
The Free Market 14, no. 4 (April 1996) In the welfare debates, Congress spared what is perhaps the most objectionable part of the welfare state, cash subsidies for illegitimate children. The opponents had committed a terrible error early in the debate. They granted the first philosophical assumption of the program’s supporters: that we all
The Free Market 14, no. 5 (May 1996) The dialectic goes like this. First, an artist—I use the term broadly—exhibits something pornographic, blasphemous, or otherwise egregiously offensive. His opus may well be an action, as when an HIV-positive “performance artist” had his back cut open before a surprised audience in Minneapolis. Next, the
The Free Market 14, no. 8 (August 1996) A premise many conservatives share with liberals is that government largess harms its beneficiaries. Welfare supposedly creates dependence and “traps” its recipients in poverty. Much as the poor want to support themselves and their families, they are lured into sloth by Aid to Families with Dependent
The Free Market 14, no. 11 (November 1996) The Senator has a painful announcement to make. His daughter is mentally ill. This gives him special insight into a social injustice: insurance companies are less willing to cover mental illness than other forms. They place annual and lifetime limits on the number of permitted psychiatric sessions, for
The Free Market 14, no. 2 (December 1996) Last Christmas some cheeky MIT undergrads pulled one of their trademark “hacks,” publishing a report on the physics of Santa Claus. Using pseudo-precise estimates of the distance Santa must travel plus the number of stops he has to make, the MIT-ers announced (tongues firmly in cheeks) that he would be
The Free Market 15, no. 3 (March 1997) Remember how, when you were a kid, the drawstrings on your jacket were constantly catching on the seesaw or the swing? How sometimes a passing car would snag the drawstrings of a friends hood, garroting him before your eyes? Neither do I. But someone at the Consumer Product Safety Commission must, because
The Free Market 15, no. 11 (November 1997) For ages, man’s right to exploit the living world—to use it for his purposes—went unquestioned. Trees were for lumber, crops for harvesting, animals for eating and skinning as well, of course, as for companionship. When not consumed directly, the products into which human labor transformed living things
The Free Market 15, no. 12 (December 1997) Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert , emerged a few years back as one of the cleverest cartoonists in the long history of that art. His eponymous protagonist, by now familiar to everyone, is a software engineer with vaguely defined duties at a large technology firm. Dilbert’s closest
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.
