Mises Search

The Free Market 30, no. 7 (July 2012)   At a United Nations meeting in the year 2000, the world’s governments agreed on the goal of enrolling every child on the planet in primary schooling by 2015. Strangely, this lofty plan does not say anything about the quality of schooling; the whole idea is to get children into government-approved classrooms,

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed • James C. Scott • Yale University Press, 1998 • 445 pages. When I first read James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State , I was studying at a far-left Canadian university, and in one of its furthest-left graduate programs. I, like many of my instructors and peers,

Here’s a snapshot from the American landscape of convoluted crony capitalism: starting this September, if a man in Los Angeles buys a book from Amazon.com, the local sales tax he pays could go to the city of San Bernardino, which will then give 80 percent of the tax money back to Amazon itself. Such roundabout arrangements of redistributive

Anticapitalists like to use examples of supposedly selfless gift exchanges in “primitive” societies to contrast with the greedy behavior of modern markets. But a closer look at one famous exotic gift exchange, the Trobriand Islanders’ Kula , actually reinforces libertarians’ claims about the universal power of the profit motive. In the elaborate

[image] In California, a law that promised to control politicians is now being used to control the public. California’s Proposition 25 promised to rein in runaway spending and “end budget gridlock” by hitting politicians’ pocketbooks. Every day on which lawmakers failed to pass a balanced budget after their June 15 deadline each year would be a

Environmentalists and mining companies are fighting over the fate of the remote Klappan Valley in northern British Columbia. The different sides struggle for government approval of their particular plans, but almost no one fully acknowledges the property rights of the first owners of the valley, the indigenous Tahltan people. The Tahltan have

At a United Nations meeting in the year 2000, the world’s governments agreed on the goal of enrolling every child on the planet in primary schooling by 2015. Strangely, this lofty plan does not say anything about the quality of schooling; the whole idea is to get children into government-approved classrooms, apparently regardless of what happens

The reporting on a violent incident at the Occupy protests last year reveals the linguistic lengths to which newspapers can go to hide responsibility. The National Post said it best: Scott Olsen, 24, a former U.S. Marine who served two tours of duty in Iraq, was struck in the head by a tear gas canister fired on Tuesday by police trying to prevent

Who would win in a rap battle, Adolf Hitler or Darth Vader? Maybe that question hasn’t exactly been gnawing at you, but in the cutthroat emerging market of Internet entertainment, writers, actors, and producers innovate tirelessly to get your attention. One of the strangest commercial successes to rise from this crucible is the Epic Rap Battles of

The great antifascist scholar Ludwig von Mises warned that government schools are an inevitable source of ethnic conflict, because dominant nationalities can use them to indoctrinate children from other cultures, pulling them away from their parents and communities. In Canada, this was explicitly the aim of the Indian residential schools, which