Back on the Road to Serfdom: The Resurgence of Statism

Since the housing bubble burst in 2007, America’s social and economic troubles have mounted rapidly. Unemployment remains high, saving and investment low. The federal government is desperate to suck in enough money to pay its enormous tab for welfare and warfare a bit longer. Our politics have become increasingly vicious. About two-thirds of the people [...]

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 [...]

A 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 [...]

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 [...]

From 1944 to Nineteen Eighty-Four

A longer version of this article appears here. I’m inclined to think of George Orwell and F. A. Hayek at the same time. Both showed great courage in writing the truth, undaunted by the consequences. Both valued freedom, though they understood it differently. Orwell, a man of the “left,” could not remain silent in the [...]

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.

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Most people seize on the failure to practice what one preaches as proof of the error of the message preached. This is the logical fallacy known as tu quoque. It is far more often the case, however, that the message is virtuous but virtue is not what the hypocritical preacher truly seeks. Ha-Joon Chang, author [...]

Bailing Out Statism

The key to understanding the saga of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the newly nationalized twin government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that dominate home financing—is this: They were created—intentionally—to distort the housing and mortgage markets. That is, government planners were not content to let voluntary exchange and spontaneous market forces configure those industries unmolested. So—holding the taxpayers hostage—they [...]