Unintended Consequences

In two earlier Freeman essays, I explored the idea that “ought implies can” and the role of profits in providing knowledge about how best to serve others. Both insights rely on the foundational idea that intentions and results are not the same thing. Thinking we ought to do something does not mean it will have [...]

How Much Money Does an Economy Need?

In How Much Money Does an Economy Need? Hunter Lewis addresses some of the most fundamental questions of monetary policy in a question-and-answer format. For a subject often clouded by technicalities, the language is refreshingly plain. Sometimes too plain, perhaps, to satisfy an academic economist. But academic economists aren’t the intended audience. The book can [...]

A Crisis of Political Economy

The current state and the current banking sector require each other. They are so reciprocally intertwined that each is an extension of the other.

Remember this the next time somebody tells you, as New York Times columnist Bob Herbert did, that “free market madmen” caused the current financial crisis that is threatening to undermine the global economy. There is no free market. There is no “laissez-faire capitalism.” The government has been deeply involved in setting the parameters for market relations for eons; in fact, genuine “laissez-faire capitalism” has never existed. Yes, trade may have been less regulated in the nineteenth century, but not even the so-called Gilded Age featured “unfettered” markets.

Ludwig von Mises: Political Realist

Here’s Ludwig von Mises, in Human Action (4th rev. ed., 793), writing about what governments–and individuals–can and cannot do during economic crises: We may admit that for the British and American governments in the ‘thirties no way was left other than that of currency devaluation, inflation and credit expansion, unbalanced budgets, and deficit spending. Governments [...]

A Festschrift for Doctor Mises

Miss Bien is a member of the staff of the Foundation for Economic Education. A milestone in the world of libertarian literature has just been passed. This event was the publication of a collection of essays, a Festschrift in tribute to Ludwig von Mises. Some of the world’s most renowned economists and leading liberal thinkers [...]