The Wall Street Journal of August 5 reports that the U.S. Department of Justice is pursuing a criminal investigation of the Mercedes unit of German car manufacturer DaimlerChrysler, suspected of having paid bribes in many countries, especially in Latin America and Africa. As a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, DaimlerChrysler is
There is scarcely one month without a corporate executive being charged with some crime or jailed for something. The Wall Street Journal runs a special on-line section about “Executives on Trial.” Just last week, four former WorldCom employees were sentenced to jail terms for such offenses as securities fraud, conspiracy, and false filings. Is
The recent run-up in oil prices drew interesting reactions. Some analysts have tried to explain how reductions of crude demand by refineries can push crude prices up ! Proving that even corporate economists don’t always remember basic economics, one of them explained that “[l]ogic and the market are barely on speaking terms these days,” as if
The current financial turmoil is a “crisis of capitalism,” said a spokesman for Britain’s Socialist Workers Party, as good Marxists have been repeating for more than a century. “[A]n unregulated financial system is a disaster,” echoed Sheila Rowbotham, professor of gender and labor history at Manchester University. Added a leftist London mayoral
If assymmetry of information can cause market failure, how about the market for government intervention? Supposedly, at least in a “democratic” regime, there is such a market. Citizens, we are told, demand assistance, which the State supplies on the payment of taxes. It doesn’t really work quite that way, but let’s say it does. Certainly
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.