Sparks flew on the United States Senate floor on Thursday and Friday, October 14 and 15, when Senators from Kentucky, Utah, and Washington took umbrage at Senator John McCain’s allegations of corruption supposedly directly tied to the policy of soft money contributions to senatorial campaigns. Senator McCain had a tough time dodging his three
Back on November 9, 1989 I lived in Auburn, Alabama. On that morning I looked at the front page of my daily paper and to my amazement a cut out map was shown on the front page with the name “Nickelsdorf” in big letters above a dot indicating a little town in Austria, about 7 miles from the Hungarian border. I was amazed because in 1953, in
Sixty-year old Jan Davis plunged to her death because her borrowed parachute didn’t open during a jump she made from El Capitan, in Yosemite National Park, on October 22. Her death immediately sparked a storm of controversy concerning how much risk people should be permitted to undertake in a free society. When adventurers want to indulge their
Socialism was shown back in 1922, in Ludwig von Mises’ book by that name, to be an impossible economic system. Von Mises demonstrated that a planned economy cannot allocate resources effectively, so that those who need things and those who can produce them are properly linked up to communicate with one another. Only in a free market is this
One of the complaints raised at the WTO meetings in Seattle, Washington, echoes the accusations that have for years been leveled at Nike, Kathy Lee Gifford, WalMart and others, all of whom have employed workers abroad who charge far less for their labor than do workers in most Western countries, especially in the US. It is that it is evil to pay
It now comes to light that the Clinton White House has tried to negotiate a deal with the commercial TV networks concerning the content of TV entertainment. The proposal, kept from the public until now, has to do with trading mandatory public service messages for inserting anti-drug abuse messages into the story lines of television programming
It would indeed be nice if all the people in the world were happy, well fed, secure in their health and work, loved by those they would like to have love them, and lived long lives which end pleasantly. But that just isn’t going to happen, ever. Still, some people never tire of insisting that it will happen and and insist that those with the legal
The only good tax is no tax. Why? How would we fund government without taxes? Those are good questions to ask. But first let’s understand what taxes are. Throughout most of history, governments--usually monarchies headed by kings, emperors, pharaohs and other major or minor tyrants--actually owned everything under their rule, including, believe it
Bill McKibben, a virulent environmentalist, was given the job of reviewing Peter Huber’s new, market friendly work on the environment, Hard Green:Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists (Basic Books, 1999), for The New York Review of Books . And he certainly has done his best to attempt to obliterate Huber’s idea that perhaps
Back in 1980, I applied to become a Congressional Fellow under a program that would place a philosopher or two into some Representative’s office and be in on brainstorming various public policy proposals. I made it to the final list and was invited to go to John Hopkins University in Baltimore where we were interviewed by a selection panel. When
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.
