The Free Market 15, no. 4 (April 1997) President Clinton, standing tall among Miami schoolchildren and pushing the Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, calls on America’s youth to stand for values. So does the U.S. Department of Education in its master plan, Goals 2000 . As do Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott, the Rainbow Curriculum in
The Free Market 16, no. 5 (May 1998) Labor Day, 1998. Time for picnics and taking it easy. Time too for thousands of blue-collar faithful to gather in Detroit not far from the United Automobile Workers Solidarity House to hail pet politicos and union chiefs and speechify, talk up income redistribution, snitch credit for America’s high living
The Free Market 5, no. 5 (May 1987) I look back with special pleasure and deep respect on that giant of our age, Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973). How he shone in his students’ lives and minds, gently schooling us in the meaning of human action and the free market. Today we glory in the truth of Misesian economics, and marvel at his lonely and
How prevalent has political corruption been over recorded history—and how did it originate? Quite an inkling as to its prevalence and origin can be found in a book written by H. J. Haskell and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1939. The book is The New Deal in Old Rome. Haskell, a newspaperman with the Kansas City Star, was both puzzled and inspired
The Free Market 24, no. 12 (2004) The democracy of the market is not the democracy that Plato spoke of in his Republic (c. 370 BC) as “a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a kind of equality to equals and unequals alike,” nor that Aristotle in his Rhetoric (c. 322 BC) chided as “when put to the strain, grows
The Free Market 26, no. 11 (November 2005) [ William Peterson is the winner of the 2005 Gary G. Schlarbaum Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty, awarded by the Mises Institute. He has served a crucial role as a leading public intellectual, elaborating on the insights of Mises through teaching, writing, and speaking on the
I’ve been reading The Bush Betrayal by James Bovard (Palgrave Macmillan, $26.95, 330 pages) and I’m impressed by the wit, bite, attention to documentation, and eye for moral concerns in James Bovard’s approach to things political, here dissecting the Bush White House in cuts more libertarian than conservative. Mr. Bovard has written for The Wall
The Free Market 20, no. 9 (September 2002) When a politician talks of ”reform,” grab your wallet. As in “welfare reform,” for example. For as any hardened inside-the-Beltway observer of dark Washington ways can tell you, “welfare reform” is typically a spin for tightening the screws on the taxpayer and easing welfare access. To be sure, a
How can free market capitalism--the secret of Western success for 250 years--gain public insight of its inherent voluntary democracy and so win better understanding and respect in Washington, higher education, the media, the 50 state legislatures, and the American household? Well, recall how communism went bust rather suddenly throughout Eastern
Investors Business Daily March 1, 1999 America’s Masochistic Business Class by William H. Peterson The aim of politics, H.L. Mencken observed, “is to keep the populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” One popular hobgoblin is the businessman. Item:
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.
