Statism is the primary theme of this year’s election. The political issues of the day are all approached from the interventionist point of view. For George Bush and Al Gore, it is not a matter of whether government should be running a social security scheme or not. It is only a matter of how government might save it. In the realm of health care,
Life is full of hidden costs, taxes, and other annoyances that hit us hard in the wallet, but one gnat in particular has been biting at me since the day I set up my first residential telephone line. It’s the “phonebook fee,” a monthly charge BellSouth, GTE and other telephone companies exact for the privilege of keeping our private information out
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
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
As a senior in high school, back in 1977, I was introduced to the writings of Ayn Rand. Rand’s work had a huge impact on my intellectual development. That impact was not merely philosophical. In her essays, Rand celebrated the enormous contributions of the Austrian school. Not too long thereafter, I discovered such thinkers as Ludwig von Mises, F.
The libertarian scholarly movement was in its infancy in 1974 when Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature first appeared. This treatise of applied libertarian political and economic theory, by Murray N. Rothbard, shaped a generation of intellectuals that went on to work within the radical vision of political and economic liberty he championed.
The Supreme Court has declined to put the antitrust case against Microsoft on fast track, decreasing the chances that the lower court and the antitrust division of the Justice Department will succeed in their efforts to break the company into two parts. To understand why this is a victory for consumers, consider a case 50 years ago when the
What are the economic effects of market dominance by one firm? To hear the Justice Department tell it, market dominance spells disaster. A market-share monopoly must be supplanted by a competitive environment imposed by the government. This view is shared by the man-on-the-street, who also fears the “market power” of a single provider of a good or
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.