Josh Wolf was a young video blogger who covered an anarchist protest in San Francisco. (On NPR I heard some of the footage--kids chanting “Smash the state! Smash the state!”) Apparently a police officer was injured and a cruiser burned. Since the cruiser was purchased with government money, the gov’t claimed it was a federal crime, and thus Wolf
This Slate article discusses a new econometric study that apparently shows juvenile criminals don’t lower their criminal behavior when they become 18 and can receive stiffer penalties. On the one hand, as a libertarian (not to mention a pacifist) I love stuff like this: The State fails in its use of stolen tax dollars and barbaric punishments! On
On July 4 I was interviewed on The Political Cesspool, and we basically talked about free trade. I got the standard jibes (”Do you want your job to be outsourced Mr. Professor?” and “Free trade would work in an ideal world but not this one”). I start around 34:30 and go to the end of the hour, but you can listen to them trash me after I leave the
Reprinted from Mises.ca Anyone who knows him personally would attest that David Gordon is a troublemaker. He lived up to this label with a recent review of the new book by Steve Forbes and Elizabeth Ames. Gordon took them to task for referring to money as a measure of value, analogous to a ruler or clock; Gordon cited the authority of Ludwig von
Reviewing intellectual ideas is often hard work, involving slogging through numerous references and deep contemplation of the author’s contentions. That is why it is a true joy to occasionally come across work so egregiously chowder-headed that we can gleefully have at it without too much work at all. Just such work was brought to our attention
Let us consider, for a moment, a complex modern economy in which the price of farm products is declining. Farmers may begin pleading for the government to stop the price drop. “Wealth is being wiped out of the economy,” they will complain, “the value of our farms has fallen 50% in the last year. This makes everyone poorer, since we can’t spend as
Now that Bush has been reelected, and has comfortable majorities in both the House and Senate, we will have at least a two-year unambiguous test of Republican fiscal policies. My prediction? Massive spending and massive deficits. After all, that’s what Republican presidents do, if history is any guide. Of course, the immediate retort is that at
The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice . Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton Forum, 2000. xiii + 183 pgs. Review by Robert P. Murphy The interested layman will find no shortage of accessible collections of government abuses. The Government Racket , by Martin
Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High-Tech by Paulina Borsook Every generation has its defining moment, when the Manichaean unfolding of history lets the good guys gain the upper hand. These moments may be tumultuous political upheavals, such as the New Deal or civil rights protests. But they also consist
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.
