Two winters ago back-to-back Nor’easters slammed the mid-Atlantic coast in Maryland and Delaware, causing significant beach erosion and damage to vacation homes, boardwalks, and businesses. Being the owner of a condo in Ocean View, Delaware, I went down to check on any damage. Although it was the middle of February, the ocean resort towns were
The nauseating and psychophantic blather in the media about “America’s Royal Family” and its “tradition of public service” seemed to go on forever after JFK, Jr., “America’s Prince,” killed himself, his wife, and his sister-in-law in a plane crash off Martha’s Vineyard. The media circus ended its “coverage” with its anointment of Kathleen
*Presentation prepared for the Mises Institute’s conference, “Austrian Economics and the Financial Markets,” Toronto, Canada, September 16-17, 1999. In 1978 Michael Jensen and William Meckling, writing in the Financial Analysts Journal , offered an extraordinarily gloomy prediction for the future of capitalism: “The most spectacular period of
[This article originally appeared in the Austrian Economics Newsletter , Summer 1991, pp. 1–6. You read can also read it in PDF .] Today regulation is generally recognized as a mechanism by which special interests lobby the government to create barriers to entry or other special privileges. Research has shown, for example, that the Civil
[ This speech was delivered at the Mises Institute’s conference on “The History of Liberty.” ] It is not an exaggeration to say that trade is the keystone of modern civilization. For as Murray Rothbard wrote: “The market economy is one vast latticework throughout the world, in which each individual, each region, each country, produces what he or
The judge in the Microsoft antitrust trial, Thomas Penfield Jackson, recently stated that he “didn’t see a distinction” between Bill Gates’s Microsoft Corporation and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. The judge is right, but for the wrong reasons. Like Gates, Rockefeller was the victim of a vindictive political assault on his company for
Joel Klein, the third-rate lawyer/political hack who is in charge of the government’s Microsoft persecution, recently tried to rationalize the lawsuit by saying that it was in keeping with the long history of consumer protection regulation, beginning with the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. In reality, the history of antitrust has been a history of
When Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson “ordered, adjudged, and decreed” the breakup of Microsoft into two separate companies he effectively replaced Bill Gates with government lawyer Joel Klein as the chief decision maker of the Microsoft Corporation. The Judge accepted almost verbatim the Clinton administration’s breakup proposal, authored by Klein
The U.S. Congress is holding hearings on why gasoline prices have risen; pundits are beginning to repeat the anti-capitalist oil company bashing of the 1970s; and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently issued a report blaming prosperity for rising housing prices and self-servingly calling for more HUD subsidies for
Appearing on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, July 30, Republican vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney endorsed the Clinton/Gore administration’s policy of energy socialism, only criticizing it as being insufficiently coercive and forceful. “We need a national energy policy,” said Cheney, apparently oblivious to the disastrous results of America’s
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.
