All Posts Tagged With: "private property"
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 | ContinuedHow 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 | ContinuedPoverty Is Easy to Explain
Academics, politicians, clerics, and others always seem perplexed by the question: Why is there poverty? Answers usually range from exploitation and greed to slavery, colonialism, and other forms of immoral behavior. Poverty is seen as something to be explained with complicated analysis, conspiracy doctrines, and incantations. This vision of poverty is part of the problem [...]
21Apr2011 | Walter E. Williams | 27 comments | ContinuedStaying Out of the Corner
In a world of pervasive scarcity, every choice has a cost. Recognizing this fact about the human condition should lead us to see the world in terms of marginal benefits and costs.
24Mar2011 | Steven Horwitz | 9 comments | ContinuedCommonwealth
Some two decades after the collapse of communism, socialist intellectuals still scramble to rehabilitate Marx and collectivist social theory in general, with Duke University professor Michael Hardt and Italian sociologist Antonio Negri leading the bunch. Academics are attracted to their radical critique of existing capitalist institutions. Non-academics and educated laypersons on the left are attracted [...]
23Mar2011 | David L. Prychitko | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Gasoline Demagogues Will Be Back
Here we go again. In late February gasoline prices across America were surpassing $3 a gallon. Forecasters are advising us to expect $4 by summer, maybe higher. So be prepared for something else with it all: the broken-record rhetoric of anti-market types about “gouging.” It’ll be coming from a lot of the same people who [...]
23Mar2011 | Lawrence W. Reed | 13 comments | ContinuedThe Conquest of the United States by Militant Islam
In 1898 William Graham Sumner, a famous libertarian sociology professor at Yale University, gave a speech titled, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.” You read that right. In the same year the U.S. government had attacked Spanish forces in Cuba and the Philippines, a case of conquest by the United States, Sumner claimed [...]
24Nov2010 | David R. Henderson | 15 comments | ContinuedFree-Speech Clarity by California Courts
When kids get into complex arguments about who did what to whom, parents can usually sort through the miasma by focusing on a few key points. Whose toy is it? Which one of you threw the first punch? And likewise, almost every major debate in the political arena these days can be sorted out by [...]
24Nov2010 | Steven Greenhut | 3 comments | ContinuedLeviathan: The Growth of Local Government and the Erosion of Liberty
Does government have too much power? Certainly—just think of all the freedom Americans have lost on account of the income tax, Social Security, Department of Labor regulations, the threat of antitrust prosecution, and so on. Note that in my short list of examples, each one is due to action by the federal government. In Leviathan, [...]
12Jul2010 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Private Road to Freedom
There is not a state in the union that does not struggle from year to year to build and maintain roads in something resembling an efficient, timely, or competent fashion. State legislatures and city governments raise only a chuckle from their constituents when suggesting that this time, this budget, they will get it right. In [...]
29Jun2010 | Scott McPherson | 1 comment | ContinuedA Free-Market Energy Vision
Energy is the master resource. Without it other resources could not be produced or consumed. Even energy requires energy: There would not be usable oil, gas, or coal without the energy to manufacture and power the requisite tools and machinery. Nor would there be wind turbines or solar panels, which are monuments to embedded fossil-fuel [...]
29Jun2010 | Robert L. Bradley Jr. | 5 comments | ContinuedLabor Economics from a Free Market Perspective: Employing the Unemployable
Notwithstanding its title, this is not a textbook on labor economics. Rather, as the author stipulates in the introduction, it is “an ideological book.” It is a collection of papers written, sometimes with coauthors, by Block during the 1990s and 2000s on various labor-related topics. Of the 29 chapters, all but three were first published [...]
21May2009 | Charles W. Baird | 0 comments | ContinuedSupreme Neglect: How to Revive Constitutional Protection for Private Property
The framers of the Constitution were acutely aware that politics—even in the highly limited democracy they envisioned—could be dangerous to private property. For that reason they added the “takings” clause to the Fifth Amendment: “Nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.” Unfortunately, like so much other constitutional language intended to [...]
2Apr2009 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | ContinuedWhat We Believe
The Foundation for Economic Education, publisher of this magazine since 1956, is now in its seventh decade, and I am now in my seventh month as its president. As we expand the outreach of our programs and publications, now is a good time to remind our readers who we are and what we believe in. [...]
2Mar2009 | Lawrence W. Reed | 8 comments | ContinuedA Property-Rights Theory of Mass Murder
Stephen Carson, a software engineer, writes independently from St. Louis. This article is condensed from “Killing and Stealing: A Property-Rights Theory of Mass Murder,” which first appeared in The Independent Review, Winter 2007, and was reprinted in Opposing the Crusader State: Alternatives to Global Interventionism, edited by Robert Higgs and Carl P. Close (The Independent [...]
1Sep2008 | Stephen W. Carson | 1 comment | ContinuedBook Reviews – September 2008
- The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism by Robert P. Murphy Reviewed by George C. Leef
- The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton Reviewed by David K. Levine
- Illiberal Justice: John Rawls vs. the American Political Tradition by David Lewis Schaefer Reviewed by Tibor R. Machan
- Leaving Women Behind: Modern Families, Outdated Laws by Kimberly A. Strassel, Celeste Colgan, and John C. Goodman Reviewed by Karen Y. Palasek
History for Sale: Why Not?
Sold!” cried the Sotheby’s auctioneer on the night of December 18, 2007, as one of history’s oldest political documents changed hands. It was Magna Carta, or rather a copy of it that dated to 1297. The buyer was not a government but an individual, a Washington lawyer named David Rubenstein. He paid $21.3 million for [...]
1May2008 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | Continued-
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