It’s not always easy to catch a morning flight. You pack the night before, with an eye to preparing for the security and logistics hurdles you must go through to make it on the plane. Liquids and gels go in a one-quart Ziploc. But what liquids? Will someone nab my contact-lens cleaner for being in too big of a container? Then there are the bags
As someone who has long been critical of our healthcare system and who has argued for true reform, I was frustrated with the bill passed in February by simple majorities in the House and Senate. Change in itself is not reform, and chanting “yes we can” to yourself one thousand times cannot make it so. Yet I wonder, Why did efforts to centralize
[ Common Sense School Reform • by Frederick M. Hess • New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 • This review originally appeared in the Journal of School Choice , September 2008, 2(3), pp. 351–354] In the socialist-calculation debates of the 1930s, when free-market and anti-market economists argued about the workability of socialism, socialists Oscar
Helping the poor is one of the most important things society does. But we do the poor no favors when we promote public policies that perpetuate poverty. This especially applies to the tax system. In this respect, the state of Alabama is often criticized. Take the news last fall that Alabama ranked 50th out of 50 states in terms of state tax rates.
Confession time: I still read newspapers the old-fashioned way, meaning the way my father and grandfather did, on paper, frequently at the kitchen table, and to the smell of a hot, Honduran coffee. I have various reasons for not yet giving in completely to the digital delivery of news. The paper I read, the Birmingham News , is a good though not
If there is one issue that pops up again and again in my conversations about economics with interested noneconomists, it is manufacturing. There’s a genuine concern about the state of manufacturing in the United States, and I am not sure of the reason why. It could be that there is an inchoate sense that manufacturing is dying here, given that so
Once upon a time, I developed a theory that we have much lower expectations for public-sector performance than we do for private-sector performance. We saw this in accounting standards that — when applied to Enron — resulted in market forces shutting that firm down, while the Department of Defense loses billions of dollars annually. The difference
“On a basic level, a job is the result of the mixing of capital and labor.” Why can’t everyone who wants a job, or a better job, just find one? In a perfect world, this would be the case. Sadly, the recently released employment figures for June indicate that the world in which we live is still far from perfect. Nationally, unemployment still
Do you remember when, Things were really hummin’, Yeaaaah, let’s twist again, Twistin’ time is here! So crooned that 1960s social philosopher, Chubby Checker, hoping to extend the popularity of the dance craze he started in a follow-up song urging the kiddies buying his music to do it again for another year. It was a successful twist on the Twist;
Thank you, Joseph Stiglitz, for providing so much fodder for free-market economists to use in their classrooms this spring. The fodder can be found in new research (with Bruce Greenwald) Stiglitz is touting . In it, he presents statistical relationships between technological improvements in agriculture and unemployment in the 1930s. He asks, What
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.