The Function of The Freeman

Editor’s Note: The Freeman began publication before it became part of the Foundation for Economic Education in 1956. Its first issue was published in 1950, with Henry Hazlitt, author of Economics in One Lesson, as an editor and FEE founder Leonard E. Read a member of the board of directors. What follows was originally part [...]

Human Action: The 60th Anniversary

We are celebrating the 60th anniversary of a great book, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, by a learned man and a clear thinker: the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. It presents Mises’s understanding–after long years of study and thought–of how the market economy functions. It is a major contribution to human knowledge. Interventionist ideas [...]

Keynes the Jokester?

I spent much of my recent vacation reading Henry Hazlitt’s chapter-by-chapter demolition of Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), The Failure of the “New Economics” (1959). I didn’t expect to read the book cover to cover, but after only a few pages I had to keep going. It is that well-written [...]

So Now Saving Is Bad

Keynes is back! Unfortunately. If you want to make sense of most of the reporting and commentary on the econony these days, you have to realize that most reporters and commentators and politicians are working from the Keynesian position that, as Paul Krugman puts it, “[I]ndividual virtue can be public vice… attempts by consumers to [...]

Who’s Afraid of Prosperity?

Should we worry that the people of China, India, and other undeveloped countries are getting richer? Apparently so, according to the newspapers and the “experts” they quote. They don’t come right out and say that global prosperity is bad for us. Instead they say, as the New York Times recently said, “As development rolls across [...]

Welfare for the Rich

Advocates of the free market—including those considered “right-wing” and “conservative”—believe it is wrong to violate property rights. Consequently, they oppose egalitarian measures to steal from the rich and give to the poor. Such “income redistribution” represents naked theft and epitomizes the Founding Fathers’ fears of unfettered democracy. At the same time, champions of laissez faire [...]

Cleaning Up After the Elephants

I detect a pattern in the challenges hurled at liberals on nearly every issue. The opponent of liberalism describes a problem, invariably with roots in a government infringement of freedom. In response, he prescribes more government interference with freedom, at which point the liberal interjects that the best and only just solution is the repeal [...]

Book Reviews – June 2006

The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good by William Easterly — reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling

The Capitalist Manifesto by Andrew Bernstein — reviewed by Gary M. Galles

Water for Sale: How Business and the Market Can Resolve the Worlds Water Crisis by Fredrik Segerfeldt — reviewed by George C. Leef

Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity by James Gwartney, Richard L. Stroup, and Dwight R. Lee — reviewed by Tom Lehman

The Freeman: Through the Years

In an age when lots of think-tanks, foundations, organizations, and institutes publish magazines extolling the benefits of free markets, it is hard to imagine the early 1950s, when only a handful of pro-free-market publications existed, most notably The Freeman.