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Sardines at Midnight

Sardines at midnight? If the mood should strike me, I can zip down to the local Safeway store here in Belmont, California, which is open 24/7, and be back with a can in 20 minutes. My biggest problem would be choosing from among Thai, Canadian, Polish, or Norwegian sardines packed in water, olive oil, tomato-basil, [...]

24Aug2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 3 comments | Continued

Ludwig von Mises: Economist, Philosopher, Prophet

Editor’s Note: September 29 is the 130th anniversary of the birth of Ludwig von Mises, the great Austrian economist, defender of classical liberalism, and adviser to FEE. Below is a selection of Mises’s writings published in The Freeman over the years. The Market It is customary to speak metaphorically of the automatic and anonymous forces [...]

24Aug2011 | Ludwig von Mises | 0 comments | Continued

The Militarization of Compassion

This article first appeared at TheFreemanOnline.org. John Stuart Mill wrote in his Principles of Political Economy that “what has so often excited wonder” in observers is “the great rapidity with which countries recover from a state of devastation; the disappearance, in a short time, of all traces of the mischiefs done by earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, [...]

22Jun2011 | Peter J. Boettke | 4 comments | Continued

The Preamble They Should’ve Written

Did the Founding Fathers get it right? Is the Constitution they drafted a secure basis for limited government? Many conservatives suppose so and believe the drift to big government has simply been a case of not reading the directions on the package. Last January these conservatives ordered that the Constitution be read aloud at the [...]

22Jun2011 | James L. Payne | 21 comments | Continued

The Modern Union versus Workers’ Rights

The raging controversy in Wisconsin over eliminating collective bargaining “rights” for government employees cast a bright and harsh light on public-sector unions. Some commentators have distinguished public-sector unions from private-sector unions, but the vested interests of the two are much the same. Both are expressions of what might be called “the modern union,” which came [...]

22Jun2011 | Wendy McElroy | 4 comments | Continued

Coming Soon: The Federal Department of Standardized Minds

The story of federal intervention in education is one of abject failure. Coming in large supply only since President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” Washington’s educational undertakings first resulted in billions of misspent dollars, then billions of misspent dollars coupled with increasingly rigid “accountability” rules. The result of both phases has been squandered funds and academic [...]

22Jun2011 | Neal McCluskey | 6 comments | Continued

What’s Up with Inflation?

Inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) has been almost nonexistent for several years, though it started creeping higher in the first half of 2011. Yet many prices have been rising at double-digit percentage rates. Are official figures trustworthy? And what of expectations? There is a great deal of buzz right now about inflation [...]

22Jun2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 14 comments | Continued

Private Investment and Public “Investment”

Politicians are fond of telling the public that we must “invest” in this program or that—be it education; health care; make-work infrastructure projects like the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere”; $50 million for an indoor rainforest in Iowa; $3.4 million for a tunnel to allow turtles to cross under a highway in Florida; $1.8 million for swine [...]

22Jun2011 | Adam B. Summers | 1 comment | Continued

Fear-Mongering and Servitude

In his 1776 essay, “Thoughts on Government,” John Adams observed, “Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it.” The [...]

22Jun2011 | James Bovard | 33 comments | Continued

The Economics of Caring and Sharing

The author would like to thank the Earhart Foundation for supporting his previous research on happiness, which led to considerations on which the present paper is based. If we were to apply the unmodified, uncurbed rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e., of the small band or troop, or say our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider [...]

22Jun2011 | Dwight R. Lee | 4 comments | Continued

Is a Nation Something That Can Be Built?

In the wake of both the collapse of the Soviet empire and the more recent U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have seen a lively debate on nation-building. Many people who are ordinarily skeptical about the power of the U.S. government as a force for good, either at home or around the world, have [...]

25May2011 | Steven Horwitz | 10 comments | Continued

Jury Nullification: Right, Remedy, or Danger?

Last December a “mutiny” occurred in a Montana courtroom. At least that’s what a stunned county deputy attorney called it. One of 27 members of a jury pool spoke up to ask why taxpayer money was being wasted to prosecute a man accused of possessing 1/16th of an ounce of marijuana. When polled, a large [...]

25May2011 | Wendy McElroy | 8 comments | Continued

How Intellectual Property Hampers the Free Market

Advocates of free-market capitalism commonly believe in the legitimacy of intellectual property (IP) because IP rights are thought to be important to a system of private property. But are they? There are good reasons to think that IP is not actually property—that it is actually antithetical to a private-property, free-market order. By intellectual property, I [...]

25May2011 | N. Stephan Kinsella | 56 comments | Continued

“Big Meat” and Big Government

Ranchers are a fairly independent bunch. We don’t like overweening authority and prefer to fend for ourselves. We also find few things more objectionable than sitting endlessly indoors. Nevertheless, 2,000 of us did just that several months ago in the ballroom of Colorado State University. Our ballroom session wasn’t very romantic, I’m afraid. While most [...]

25May2011 | Paul Schwennesen | 0 comments | Continued

Don’t Worry About the Yuan

Especially during dismal economic times, many Americans—goaded by media figures and politicians—look with suspicion on foreigners. This tendency is most obvious in anti-immigrant sentiment, but also manifests itself in a drive for protective tariffs and other trade restrictions. Over the past few years China’s “currency manipulation” has been a particularly hot-button issue. Pundits claim the [...]

25May2011 | Robert P. Murphy | 4 comments | Continued

Money and Inflation: What’s Going On in the World?

Are America and the world at risk for another inflationary episode similar to the 1970s and early 1980s? Or do current low rates of inflation portend low inflation for the foreseeable future? David Wessel revisited this question in his “Capital” column in the February 24, 2011, Wall Street Journal. He correctly stated that the Federal [...]

25May2011 | Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr. | 6 comments | Continued

Abolitionist Sisters

Sarah and Angelina Grimké were born into good fortune. Their father, John Grimké, had been a lieutenant colonel in the Revolutionary War and speaker in the South Carolina House of Representatives before becoming a plantation owner and judge on the state Supreme Court. The girls could look forward to a life of ease. In front [...]

25May2011 | John Blundell | 2 comments | Continued
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