This article in last October’s Business Week is heartening to the logical reader right down to its second-to-last paragraph. Auden Schendler, a pioneering corporate environmentalist, has seen the darkness, and it’s in the barrel of a gun. Having practiced his craft in an undeniably sincere, energetic, and ingenious manner for well over a decade,
The media have made us all aware of how rapacious lenders and (in a few cases) mendacious borrowers foisted the subprime mortgage mess (SMM) on us. Here and there may have come a whisper about chronically forcibly depressed interest rates and profligate creation of money by the Fed, and never, ever will the elephant in the living room of
This Economist review of Tim Harford’s new book suggests rewarding reading for economist and non-economist alike. Like Human Action , this “economics” book bears a title that eschews the e-word entirely, consistent with the Austrian viewpoint that all behavior is economic
God knows, if it weren’t for intellectual flexibility, we’d probably all still be the mindless statists we were trained to be in the government schools. The career of former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan illustrated this starkly (and in the wrong direction) in the eyes of anyone familiar with his 1966 essay advocating a gold standard . But those
Encouragingly, the mainstream economics profession has been prating for some time now about the connection between the “rule of law” and economic prosperity and growth. Most libertarians might take this increasingly popular term as mainstream code for “freedom and property rights,” as I do. I feel it’s what they’re trying to get at while: (a)
Anthropogenic global warming has been a dubious proposition from the outset to anyone with the slightest understanding of social science as it pertains to coercive government, science “science,” and the nexus of the two. Even if you didn’t read about it elsewhere (and there were places where you could), you could (and should) have easily thought
It probably began with the 50 or so statewide unions barring anyone who didn’t pass the state exam from pronouncing accounting opinions. It hit high gear when FDR’s Congress (and it WAS FDR’s Congress) established the Securities and Exchange Commission and put crooked Joseph P. Kennedy in charge of it. Then came Enron and the establishment of the
At first blush, incarceration would seem to involve a loss of physical mobility – you have to stay in the prison all day and all night. You can’t go anywhere else. But you might have TV to watch, videos, recorded music, e-mail, mail mail, the Internet, even the prison library. So, the inability to move about outside the prison can be adapted to.
Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, uttered inconvenient truths to those who would manage the world’s economies in a startling plenitude that could be neither ignored nor validly denied. Her speech made the front page of Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal. While blasting both the power wielded by the US Fed and the Bank of England and the
The (immortal) German state of Bavaria, it seems, claims and exercises ownership rights in respect of Adolf Hitler’s bestseller, Mein Kampf . Sixty-four years after the author’s death, this article in Haaretz recounts the prosecution in Poland of an entrepreneur who got 20,000 copies printed up, presumably in Polish. Just what market it
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.