All Posts Tagged With: "redistribution"

The Legal Foundations of Free Markets

The Legal Foundations of Free Markets, a recent book from the veteran British free-market Institute of Economic Affairs, brings together essays by nine leading experts in law and economics that delve into the interface between the legal system and the economy. The book blends historical analysis, economics, and legal theory, yielding many penetrating insights. Each [...]

5Jan2010 | George C. Leef | 2 comments | Continued

From Good Samaritan to Robin Hood

The clamor from interventionists against inequality morphs into a clamor for a larger and larger state. This path leads to the loss of liberty and a distortion of both democracy and justice. It distorts democracy because, by attempting to solve inequality, it removes limits to power and expands the field of state action. It distorts justice because the only way to solve inequality politically is for the state to have the power to treat individuals unequally. Thus the struggle to eliminate inequality ends up destroying the most important form of equality for an open society: equality before the law.

10Jun2009 | Carlos Rodríguez Braun | 2 comments | Continued

Welcome to Canada

Monte Solberg is a member of the Canadian Parliament and chief finance critic for the Reform Party. People who are newcomers or visitors to Canada sometimes have trouble understanding how our government works so I have prepared the following short primer. Taxes are the money forcibly taken from almost every man, woman, and child in [...]

1Dec1999 | Monte Solberg | 0 comments | Continued

Transforming the Political Marketplace

What we expect from our politicians goes a long way toward determining what kind of politicians we can expect to find in office. Just as suppliers compete by trying to please their customers, politicians compete by trying to please voters. Just as the features of cars tell us something about the preferences of car buyers, [...]

1Dec1999 | Russell Roberts | 0 comments | Continued

Property and the Moral Life

Hayek’s bold statement that “Private property is the most important guaranty of freedom” holds true at many levels. Certainly it is private property that allows the individual to be independent from the whims of his government and his fellows. And, as Robert Nozick has elegantly argued, any ahistorical scheme to redistribute property is incompatible with [...]

1Feb1998 | Jason Baldwin | 0 comments | Continued

Campaign Finance: The Symptom, Not the Problem

For decades politicians and pundits have been wringing their collective hands over massive political campaign contributions and spending. Almost daily there are revelations of campaign law violations and even suggestions of bribery. Pundits lament that many “good” people avoid political life because of the need to raise sufficient money to campaign effectively. Everyone agrees, in [...]

1Feb1998 | John T. Wenders | 1 comment | Continued

Inequality of Wealth and Incomes

Professor Mises (1881-1973), one of the century’s pre-eminent economic thinkers, was academic adviser to The Foundation for Economic Education from 1946 until his death. This article first appeared in the May 1955 issue of Ideas on Liberty, published by FEE. The market economy—capitalism—is based on private ownership of the material means of production and private [...]

1Mar1996 | Ludwig von Mises | 1 comment | Continued

The Forgotten Man

Mr. Chamberlain, the well-known literary critic, is also an associate editor of Barron’s. He’s the one from whom the money is taken to subsidize the others A nation begins to decline when it neglects its own classics. But no trend is necessarily permanent, and classics can come back. Take the case of William Graham Sumner’s [...]

1Sep1955 | John Chamberlain | 4 comments | Continued

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