Today’s crop of central planners and big-spending politicians could learn a thing or two about economics from Henry Hazlitt’s classic bestseller, Economics in One Lesson , published in 1946. Common sense doesn’t have an expiration date. “There is no more persistent and influential faith in the world today than faith in government spending,”
The good news is that Americans’ distrust of government is at its highest level ever. It’s good news because it shows the public recognizes how poorly we’re being governed. Not much good comes out of trusting people who shouldn’t be trusted — not much good comes out of reelecting them, either. Only 9 percent of Americans approve of the way
The Free Market 14, no. 7 (July 1996) “Forget the minimum wage,” says Nate, a dishwasher and cook’s helper at our restaurant. “It’s taxes that are killing me.” He is a college student by day, washes about 1,000 dishes during the dinner rush, and stuffs and rolls grape leaves until midnight. To retain his services, we pay higher than the minimum
The Free Market 16, no. 1 (January 1998) Everyone knows about the class-action lawsuit against Hooters, the restaurant featuring waitresses in shorts and tight t-shirts. In the settlement, Hooters paid $2 million to the men who were denied the opportunity to serve as Hooter Girls, another $1.75 million in lawyer’s fees, and created three new
The Free Market 16, no. 10 (October 1998) In 1944, Ludwig von Mises published one of his least-known masterworks: Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War . Drawing on his prewar experience in Vienna, watching the rise of the National Socialists in Germany (the Nazis), who would eventually take over his own homeland, he
The Free Market 18, no. 1 (January 2000) Jean-Claude Castex is surrounded by miracles, or at least the quest for miracles. As the official feutier, or tender of religious candles, at Lourdes, the spot in France where the Virgin Mary appeared in a grotto to a poor miller’s daughter in the nineteenth century, Castex sees, on average, some 14,000
Sorry to say, there’s not much that’s new. “The CIA was asleep, the FBI was asleep, the FAA was asleep,” James Woolsey told Chris Matthews on MSNBC on the night before the release of the September 11 Commission’s final report. “The rubber never met the road,” explained Woolsey, CIA chief during the first two years of the Clinton administration,
Greed for political power can be more harmful to a population’s overall well-being than the capitalist “greed” an entrepreneur might have for a larger market share or the “greed” a worker might have within capitalism for a larger income. As a case in point, recent disclosures about the level of corruption and fraud related to the relief efforts
In 1959, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and Vice President Richard Nixon walked through a replica of a six-room American ranch house that was on display at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. As the two superpower leaders entered the kitchen area, Nixon pointed to the dishwasher and said, “In America, we like to make life easier for
With all the trouble the Bush administration is in, both domestically and internationally, you’d think the Democrats could come up with something better as an election strategy than an anti-business crusade. Sen. Joseph R. Biden, a likely Democrat presidential candidate in 2008, launched the following salvo against Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest
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.