All Posts Tagged With: "free markets"

The Gilded Age: A Modest Revision

Mark Twain named the decades after 1865 the “Gilded Age,” and Progressive historian Vernon Louis Parrington sketched them in some detail in 1927. For Parrington (Main Currents in American Thought, volume 3), the Gilded Age was a “Great Barbecue” of continuous government largesse and State-assisted capital accumulation under a very simple philosophy: “[P]reemption [of land] meant exploitation [...]

21Sep2011 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 4 comments | Continued

The Many Monopolies

We libertarians defend economic freedom, not big business. We advocate free markets, not the corporate economy. And what would freed markets look like? Nothing like the controlled markets we have today. But how often do we hear mass unemployment, financial crisis, ecological catastrophe, and the economic status quo attributed to the voraciousness of “unfettered free [...]

24Aug2011 | Charles Johnson | 19 comments | Continued

Medical Consumers or Wards of the State?

Paul Krugman wants to know: “How did it become normal, or for that matter even acceptable, to refer to medical patients as ‘consumers’?” Let’s concede for argument’s sake there is something unattractive about viewing patients as consumers. Krugman writes, “Medical care, after all, is an area in which crucial decisions—life and death decisions—must be made. [...]

22Jun2011 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | 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

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

Government and Conflict

Human differences such as race, ethnicity, religion, and language have always been sources of conflict. Despite arguments to minimize the importance of these differences, people still exhibit preferences in these areas when choosing a spouse, friend, business partner, employee, neighborhood, and other associations. People do not associate randomly. Efforts to deny such assortative behavior in [...]

22Dec2010 | Walter E. Williams | 4 comments | Continued

The Charade

Writing in Forbes recently, Dinesh D’Souza presents the bizarre idea that Barack Obama’s presidency can be best understood by realizing that “Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s [that is, Obama’s late estranged Kenyan father]. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world [...]

22Dec2010 | Sheldon Richman | 10 comments | Continued

Some Constructive Heresies of Wilhelm Röpke

Wilhelm Röpke was a pro-market liberal who helped found the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 along with F. A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Leonard Read. But he has some significant differences with Anglo-American classical liberals that are worth exploring. Born in Schwarmstedt in northern Germany in 1899, Röpke came from a family of Lutheran [...]

22Dec2010 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 2 comments | Continued

Why Not Socialism?

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin Wall came down, millions were lifted out of oppression, and the Mises/Hayek critique of socialism was (supposedly) vindicated. As the world slogs through the continuing recession, however, dissenting voices grow louder. The late G. A. Cohen, an iconic political philosopher of the [...]

22Dec2010 | Art Carden | 6 comments | Continued

Memo to Alan Greenspan: Keep Quiet

I’m getting tired of Alan Greenspan. First, the former Federal Reserve chairman blamed an allegedly unregulated free market for the housing and financial debacle. Now he favors repealing the Bush-era tax cuts. This has a certain sad irony. Recall that Greenspan once was an associate of Ayn Rand, the philosophical novelist who provided a moral [...]

22Oct2010 | John Stossel | 10 comments | Continued

Wilfrid Laurier: A Canadian Statesman

Owing to where most Americans trace their ancestry from, we tend to know more European history than the history of our immediate neighbors to the north and south, Canada and Mexico. We can name famous entrepreneurs and political leaders from across the sea but rarely one from right next door. Last May in a casual [...]

22Oct2010 | Lawrence W. Reed | 4 comments | Continued

The Distorting Effects of Transportation Subsidies

Although critics on the left are very astute in describing the evils of present-day society, they usually fail to understand either the root of those problems (government intervention) or their solution (the operation of a freed market). In Progressive commentary on energy, pollution, and so on—otherwise often quite insightful—calls for government intervention are quite common. [...]

22Oct2010 | Kevin A. Carson | 51 comments | Continued

What Does the Oil Spill Prove?

You’ve got to hand it to the people who dislike free markets. They see them everywhere, especially wherever any serious problem arises. That no free market exists within a thousand miles makes no difference whatsoever. Take the oil spill in the Gulf. Market opponents are having a field day. They say this finally demonstrates the [...]

25Aug2010 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | Continued

Applied Economics: Thinking Beyond Stage One

This book works well on two levels. First, it explains the basic principles of economics in an unusual way—without equations, graphs, and jargon. It could be read easily by an intelligent ninth-grader, but it is neither condescending nor dull. Sowell is a master storyteller. Second, Applied Economics compares how well markets work to how well [...]

9Jul2010 | Craig M. Newmark | 4 comments | Continued

World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

The list of complaints against laissez-faire capitalism is long, including such contradictory notions as its guilt in impoverishing the masses and its role in enabling the poor to escape their “proper” station in life. In World on Fire, Amy Chua adds to the list, arguing that capitalism, when combined with democratization in economically developing nations, [...]

2Jul2010 | George C. Leef | 2 comments | Continued

Stimulate the Catallaxy?

Last fall and winter’s brouhaha over the so-called economic stimulus package got me thinking about how far off target most people are when they talk about “the economy.” To hear the politicians and commentators tell it, the economy is a big machine located somewhere in Washington, D.C. That machine requires a skilled operator, and elections [...]

1Jul2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

Friedrich Hayek

In this first full-length biography of Friedrich Hayek—economist, thinker, Nobel laureate, and political philosopher of the rule of law, liberty, and limited government—Alan Ebenstein offers a veritable intellectual travelogue of Hayek’s journey through life. As a student, we learn, Hayek was mildly socialist. However, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises’s devastating critique, Socialism(1922), “fundamentally altered [his] [...]

30Jun2010 | Bettina Bien Greaves | 0 comments | Continued
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