Mises Search

As with so many mainstream publications, the news division of my local paper repeats unhesitatingly nearly all of the panic about the environment. Why not? How independent can editors and reporters really afford to be? This question is especially appropriate in a climate of widespread political correctness and about members of the profession that

A few days ago I received an e-mail telling me that some producer at ABC-TV News was hoping to find some evidence of what taxation does to people. The post went on: “Specifically, the producer wants to find someone who is trying to cope with the high medical costs of helping an ill family member. She wants to make the point that if this person

This is a pretty good measure of how far we have come in America in our understanding of freedom from that of the founders: Bill Clinton awarded the “Medal of Freedom” to John Kenneth Galbraith on August 9, 2000, despite the fact that Galbraith has been a stalwart champion of the very opposite idea of freedom from that laid out by those founders.

At Harvard University, a famous defender of communitarianism, Michael Sandel of the Department of Government, has denounced competition and is supposed to have insisted that his own kids play noncompetitive baseball. The reason? He believes that competition is too individualistic, supports a spirit of rivalry and undermines the cooperative

You would think that smart intellectuals would realize that no such animal as capitalism exists in the USA or anywhere else. In America we have a welfare state, a highly regulated, even regimented economy, which, admittedly, is relatively more free than the economies of other countries around the globe but by no means as free with respect to

Among those who see privatization--the disassociation of government from goods and services that are otherwise economically viable---as a very desirable thing, a debate has raged for quite some time. Should government subsidize what is being privatized as a step away from nationalization?  The same sort of debate would be quite appropriate when it

As reported in The New York Times   [link requires registration] an emerging and relatively novel school of economic theorists is now making a pitch for more government regulation of the economy.  In particular, Professors David Laibson of Harvard University and Sendhil Mullainathan of MIT are making some waves with their idea that economic

In Tipton, Iowa, a teacher resigns because, reportedly, superiors were about to reprimand her for allowing a student to do research on rapper Eminem. In Mishawaka, Indiana, more than a thousand students were reported to have walked out of school because they didn’t welcome a virtual complete ban on music in response to a parent’s complaint about

When I was a student at the Munich American High School and Cleveland’s John Adams High School, I studied American history and was taught what had been then and still seems to be the standard account of the American Civil War. My own children have received roughly the same instruction during their primary and secondary educations in Virginia,

In ancient times, the philosopher Aristotle championed a policy of moderation, by which he meant steering a path between two faulty extremes. For example, there is an alternative to acting cowardly and being rash, and that moderate position is the virtue of courage. This doctrine of the mean, as it came to be known, is the core of ancient ethical