The Free Market 18, no. 5 (May 2000) The Pulitzer Prize has been known for honoring great works and great folly. A newspaper colleague of mine in 1977 won a Pulitzer for a very moving (if, albeit, a bit staged) photograph of a legless Vietnam veteran sitting in a wheelchair in the rain watching an Armed Forces Day Parade in Chattanooga,
The Free Market 18, no. 8 (August 2000) The president of the United States was ecstatic. Never had economic prospects in this country looked better. Unemployment was at its lowest level in years, the rate of inflation was relatively low, and the economy had grown continuously for almost eight years. No doubt, said the experts, this country was
The Free Market 18, no. 9 (September 2000) Mt. Rushmore is famous because 60 years ago, someone carved the faces of four dead presidents into its lofty Harney Peak granite cliffs. The mountain itself is located in the Black Hills, a somewhat obscure mountain range in western South Dakota and eastern Wyoming that resembles the Southern
The Free Market 18, no. 10 (October 2000) Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal is excited. The leftist columnist believes that he has found a wonderful “Third Way” example of using government to help poor people without the whole thing becoming yet another socialist giveaway. However, as with most government schemes that Hunt and his statist media
The Free Market 18, no. 11 (November 2000) During the seemingly endless debate over the government’s treatment of Microsoft, the consensus seems to be that this is mostly a battle over ideas, including the role of government in economic matters. Whenever the subject of “self interest” appears, it usually deals with Microsoft’s competitors that
The Free Market 18, no. 12 (December 2000) Rumor has it that the economics profession has finally been “won over” to a free-market view of the world. If the complimentary economics textbooks that cross my desk are a bellwether, however, it is not yet time to break out the champagne. There is almost nothing in these texts on the strategic
The Free Market 19, no. 1 (January 2001) A mathematician and an economist were asked, “What is the sum of two plus two?” The mathematician immediately answered, “It is four.” The economist, on the other hand, closed all windows and doors and asked quietly, “What do you want it to be?” Just when we think this story is simply another silly
The Free Market 19, no. 2 (February 2001) While it did not make headway in this latest presidential campaign, events of the last year have weakened one of the longest-standing policies of the US government: the trade embargo with Cuba. Born in the cold war fervor of the early 1960s and further strengthened by the Cuban Missile Crisis of October
The Free Market 19, no. 4 (April 2001) In an earlier article in the FreeMarket , I questioned whether or not Joel Klein, who headed the US Justice Department’s Antitrust Division during the Clinton administration’s jihad against Microsoft, was doing so as a “public servant,” or might there be a more personal agenda. We now have our answer: Klein
The Free Market 19, no. 6 (June 2001) Myths are myths, whether told by storytellers or by Tom Brokaw on NBC Nightly News . Brokaw has recently taken to telling his viewers that the consumer is spending enough to prevent a recession. The reasoning goes as such: Confident consumers do not fear the future, which means they spend almost all (if not
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.
