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The decision by Amtrak, the nation’s socialist passenger rail system, to pull all 18 of its Acela high-speed locomotives out of service highlights once again the truism that socialism and capital do not mix very well. What is being touted in the news media as simply a maintenance issue is actually another example of the fact that, under socialism,

With the recent guilty plea of former Enron executive Michael Kopper, it seems that the floodgates are now officially open in the government’s war against American business. Democrats are demanding something just short of summary executions, while Republicans and President George W. Bush are trying to outdo the Democrats in their anti-business

The California power crisis has made the headlines again, as the state’s Public Utilities Commission has declared that the culprits all along were the power companies, who deliberately created the crisis by “withholding electricity.” Princeton’s Paul Krugman, the economics columnist for The New York Times, has joined in, declaring that the crisis

I write these words while driving away from an interdisciplinary business conference that my colleagues and I attended this past week. One might think that business professors might have a handle on what happened with the collapse of the Enron Corporation and the implosion of other firms whose failures, while not as spectacular as the former

As an economist, I must admit to more than a passing interest in who receives the annual Nobel Prize for Economics.  While the results generally have been disappointing--witness one of last year’s winners, Joseph Stiglitz, who has argued that socialism and other forms of government intervention can serve as a “signaling” device to denote high

[John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, “the Beltway Snipers,” shot 13 people over the course of three weeks in October 2002. Police finally caught them on October 24. This Mises Daily was first published on November 4, 2002. An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Colin Hussey, is available for download .] As many writers have pointed out

With the mid-term elections barely over, the Federal Reserve, in a move that gives even politics a bad name, has announced yet another cut in its key interest rates.  The Federal Funds Rate is down to 1.25 percent, while the discount rate now stands at 0.75 percent. No doubt, economists from all sides will applaud this “long overdue” move by

In a recent newspaper interview, Al Gore finally came out of the socialist closet and declared that the “solution” to what he deems as a “crisis” in U.S. medical care is for the government to impose a “single payer system.”  While some folks might consider Gore’s remarks a setback to the possibilities of actually establishing free market

With corporate meltdowns the past year at Enron and WorldCom and the government’s destruction of the once-respected Arthur Andersen firm, much anger and invective—especially from the political classes and their allies—has been aimed at U.S. business in general.   Not surprisingly, contributors to publications put out by the Ludwig von Mises

As the economic downturn moves into its third year, making it the longest in the postwar period, the White House announces yet another economic “stimulus” package. Now, this set of proposals is not to be confused with “Stimulus I” or “Stimulus II,” or even the ongoing “stimulus” actions taken by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve System. No,