All Posts Tagged With: "mercantilism"

Liberty and the Power of Ideas

A belief that I stress again and again is that we are at war—not a physical, shooting war, but nonetheless a war that is fully capable of becoming just as destructive and just as costly. The battle for the preservation and advancement of liberty is a battle not against personalities but against opposing ideas. The [...]

25May2011 | Lawrence W. Reed | 9 comments | Continued

Civil War and the American Political Economy

The task before us is to assess in largely material terms the political-economic system arising during and after the American Civil War. Ideological issues existed, certainly, but much evidence suggests that pure idealism had a rather limited run. Antislavery was one of many themes generally serving as the stalking horse for more practical causes. Slavery [...]

23Mar2011 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 4 comments | Continued

Help for the Downtrodden Corporate Exporter

The Ex-Im Bank grows out of the mercantilist belief that the wealth of nations is determined by a “favorable balance of trade.” Therefore the level of exports is crucial and government promotion is paramount. All balderdash, of course.

12Nov2010 | Sheldon Richman | 8 comments | Continued

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, from the Pilgrims to the Present

Professor Thomas DiLorenzo of Loyola College, Maryland, has managed to pack two books into the volume titled How Capitalism Saved America. The first is the work promised in the title, the inspiring story about the creative power of that nexus of voluntary exchanges known as capitalism. The second, more sobering, book inhabiting these same pages [...]

13Jul2010 | Robert Batemarco | 24 comments | Continued

Anti-Populists Made America Great?

New York Times neoconservative columnist David Brooks dislikes populism (“The Populist Addiction,” January 25). “Trust your betters and criticize not their deeds,” he says in effect. After all, when you become a billionaire, you’ll expect others to treat you thus. That any one of us might strike it rich stems, apparently, from the wonderfully open, [...]

20Apr2010 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 1 comment | Continued

Did Locke Really Justify Limited Government?

John Locke (1632–1704) was a physician, statesman, and political philosopher, filling that last office in a dry, “empirical,” and militantly antipoetic English mode. Locke’s stock has risen and fallen over the years. Contemporaries called him a Socinian (a precursor of Unitarianism), a deist, a Muslim, and an opportunist. Later critics have seen Locke as the [...]

24Feb2010 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 15 comments | Continued
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Mr. President, Meet Mr. Smith

Since it’s obviously possible for people to reach the pinnacle of politics without seeming to know much about either economics or Smith, perhaps we’re overdue for a little reminder about both.

1Dec2008 | Lawrence W. Reed | 4 comments | Continued

Commerce, Markets, and Peace: Richard Cobden’s Enduring Lessons

Edward Stringham is a visiting associate professor of economics at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. A longer version of this article won second prize (faculty division) in the 2003 Olive W. Garvey Fellowship Program for the Independent Institute and is reprinted in Opposing the Crusader State: Alternatives to Global Interventionism, edited by Robert Higgs and [...]

1Oct2008 | Edward P. Stringham | 0 comments | Continued

Full Context

In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith famously wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” It may seem strange that history’s best-known advocate of the free market would cast such aspersions [...]

1Apr2006 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

How Nineteenth-Century Americans Responded to Government Corruption

James Rolph Edwards is an associate professor of economics at Montana State University-Northern. From its origin as a distinct secular scientific discipline with the French Physiocratic school in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the British classical school that followed, economics had a pro-market, limited-government orientation. Indeed, intellectual historians and political philosophers often refer [...]

1Apr2004 | James Rolph Edwards | 2 comments | Continued

Deficits Do Matter

Hans Sennholz served as president of the Foundation for Economic Education from 1992 to 1997.  At the time of his retirement, FEE’s Board of Trustees honored him with the title president emeritus. He was chairman of the department of economics at Grove City College for many years. This article is reprinted from the December 1986 [...]

1Mar2004 | Hans F. Sennholz | 8 comments | Continued

Trade and the Rise of Freedom

Thomas DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland. This is adapted from a paper presented at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s conference on “’The History of Liberty” at Auburn University, January 29, 2000. It is no exaggeration to say that trade is the keystone of modern civilization. As Murray Rothbard wrote, “The [...]

1Jun2000 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 2 comments | Continued

The New Feudalism

Many of the modern political power plays seem to historian Clarence Carson to be a reversion to feudalism without the stabilizing effects such measures afforded in earlier times.

1Jul1967 | Clarence B. Carson | 1 comment | Continued

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