Jimmy Winkelmann, a freshman here at the University of Missouri, established The South Butt clothing company, poking fun at today’s logo-obsessed youth. The result? You guessed it: a cease-and-desist letter from The North Face , accusing Winkelmann of sowing “confusion” in the marketplace and violating its intellectual-property rights.
The business of political capitalism, that is. Like Enron , Goldman operates primarily in the nebulous world of public-private interaction. It is the US’s most politically powerful financial firm, skilled at navigating the byzantine regulations governing the virtually nationalized US financial sector. Goldman’s eye-popping $3.4 billion
In my exchange with Roderick Long on government and the corporation I made two basic points. First, the corporate form of organization is indeed imperfect, as “left-libertarians” point out, but so are all forms of organization, including networks of independent contractors, worker-owned cooperatives, household production, and so on. Each has
If you’ve never read Bob Higgs’s brilliant Crisis and Leviathan (Oxford, 1987), you’re missing one of the great social-science books of our time. Higgs demonstrates, in meticulous detail, how the growth of the American state in the twentieth century has followed a regular pattern: a national or international “crisis,” real or imagined, followed by
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.