Mises Search

During the press conference on May 19, 1998, announcing the broad range anti-trust action of the Department of Justice against Microsoft, there was just one piece of evidence cited against the company that pointed to some effort to subvert consumer choice. In an internal memo Microsoft employed the phrase “make the customer” use one of the

One way to prove that someone’s idea makes no sense is to show that it entails something absurd. So you say none of us can know anything. Doesn’t this mean you cannot either? So how then do you know none of us knows anything? You know the rest. This is called the “reductio ad absurdum” argument and it is used all the time to discredit flawed

Individualists are often charged with neglecting the community. This is a variant of the charge that if you strive for profit, you are neglecting the useful or if you aim for the private interest, the public interest must not be of any concern to you. The charge, however, is spurious and certainly unproven, except in a perverse sense. That sense

Professor James Beck of Columbia University was steamed, at least back in 1995, when he expressed his dismay to “60 Minutes” about efforts to restore Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. Today the job is completed and there are still folks who share Professor Beck’s outlook. What is at issue? I am no art historian, let alone an expert at art

With Hillary Clinton’s decision to explore a possible run for the Senate seat vacated in New York State by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the political landscape appears to be gaining a clarity it hasn’t had since the arrival of Bill Clinton in the White House. Bill Clinton has been the kind of politician folks refer to as a centrist, meaning by this

When the government in a free society interacts with the citizenry, no bias is supposed to occur. That is the gist of the rule of law. The law is to apply to everyone in the same way. In the same spirit, Public Broadcasting, which is partly financed by the government, is often urged to be fair-minded, unbiased in the way it deals with various

When Hillary Clinton explained her husband’s philandering was probably due to the fact that “he was scarred by abuse,” specifically by “the terrible conflict between his mother and grandmother,” she gave voice to a very widespread trend of thinking in our era. This is that when we engage in misconduct, we do so because certain facts in our history

Over the years of watching the democratic process I’ve noticed something important. People tend to reject democracy, indeed, fight it tooth and nail, when it doesn’t go their way. But when it does, well, it is the tops. Consider Proposition 187, which cut off welfare to illegal immigrants. Governor Gray Davis of California is now maneuvering to

President Clinton has been itching to find some way to make government a major player on the Internet. So he issued an executive order to establish a working group “to address unlawful conduct that involves the use of the Internet.” It is to “prepare a report and recommendations concerning: (1) The extent to which existing Federal laws provide a

CNN and other news organizations are reporting that eggs, among other natural foods, can now be reengineered so as to remove all their harmful attributes, but also that polls show most folks proclaim that they will not touch a genetically engineered food item. Is the idea of genetic engineering too weird to contemplate? We will be eating stuff