All Posts Tagged With: "voluntary exchange"
Of Malice and Straw Men
We libertarians must be onto something. Why else would critics work so hard to construct straw men to demolish rather than contending with our actual arguments? Right from the top you could tell that Stephen Metcalf’s blast in Slate would be no different. “Liberty Scam” featured this teaser: “Why even Robert Nozick, the philosophical father [...]
21Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 5 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 | ContinuedThe Importance of Subjectivism in Economics
For an exchange to take place, the two parties must assess the items traded differently, with each party valuing what he is to receive more than what he is to give up.
7Jan2011 | Sheldon Richman | 17 comments | ContinuedGovernment and Conflict
Human differences such as race, ethnicity, religion, and language have always been sources of conflict. Despite arguments to minimize the importance of these differences, people still exhibit preferences in these areas when choosing a spouse, friend, business partner, employee, neighborhood, and other associations. People do not associate randomly. Efforts to deny such assortative behavior in [...]
22Dec2010 | Walter E. Williams | 4 comments | 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 | ContinuedHayek on Closed Shops and Yellow Dogs
Charles Baird is a professor of economics and the director of the Smith Center for Private Enterprise Studies at California State University at East Bay . In my December 2006 column I discussed some of Hayek’s classical-liberal views on the rule of law and labor unions. In brief, Hayek approved of voluntary unionism based on [...]
1Apr2007 | Charles W. Baird | 0 comments | ContinuedEconomics for the Citizen Part II
There are four classes of behavior that can be called economic behavior: production, consumption, exchange, and specialization. Production is any behavior that creates utility, that is, raises the want-satisfying capacity of something. When a mill smelts iron ore, it raises the want-satisfying capacity of the material by changing its form. The metal’s want-satisfying capacity is [...]
1Sep2005 | Walter E. Williams | 1 comment | ContinuedI’d Push the Button—To Establish Freedom Right Now
In April 1946, a month after the late Leonard E. Read established the Foundation for Economic Education, he gave a talk in Detroit called “I’d Push the Button.” He said that if there were a button on the podium that would immediately abolish all controls and regulations on the U.S. economy, he would push it. [...]
1Jun2005 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedOn Price Gouging
The immediate aftermath of a natural disaster inevitably brings much higher prices for staple goods, such as lumber, batteries, fuel, and bottled water. Just as inevitably, these higher prices are roundly decried as unjust and inexcusable. Such price hikes are slapped with the derisive name “price gouging.” And even people who typically endorse markets often [...]
1Apr2005 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | ContinuedFree-Market Justice Is in the Cards
Nearly everyone takes it for granted that if government did not protect consumers from fraud, no such protection would be provided. The free market, however, protects consumers in countless ways, all without any government intervention. In fact, it does so more efficiently and effectively than the government can. One of the most impressive examples of [...]
1Apr2005 | Jacob H. Huebert | 0 comments | ContinuedGlobal Corruption and the Interventionist State
Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. In a recent survey of 50,000 people in 62 countries around the world, at least one out of every ten people admitted that he had bribed some corrupt political official or government administrator during the preceding 12 months. There seem to be very few places anywhere in the [...]
1Feb2005 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Most Elusive Proposition
Most explanations of the division of labor are actually explanations of increased productivity due to specialization. The most common example is Adam Smith’s pin factory in The Wealth of Nations, where each worker becomes better at his job because that’s all he has to concentrate on. But the increase in wealth from the division of [...]
1Oct2004 | Manuel F. Ayau | 2 comments | ContinuedFree-Trade Theory No Longer Applies?
In an op-ed in the January 6 New York Times, “liberal” U.S. Senator Charles Schumer and conservative economist Paul Craig Roberts tapped into the anxiety felt by many Americans about their changing roles in the global economy. The authors argued that new economic conditions undermine the classic argument for free trade: The case for free [...]
1May2004 | Gene Callahan | 0 comments | ContinuedBusiness and Ethics
The Rev. Edmund Opitz is a contributing editor and a former member of FEE’s staff and board of trustees. This is reprinted from the December 1983 issue of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty. Mr. X manufactures gizmos in a plant which uses the varied skills of a thousand employees. These people might cheerfully acknowledge that [...]
1Jan2004 | Edmund A. Opitz | 2 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – December 2003
Stalin’s Other War: Soviet Grand Strategy, 1939–1941 by Albert L. Weeks Rowman & Littlefield • 2002 • 201 pages • $60 hardcover; 24.95 paperback Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling For most of the period since the end of World War II the general interpretation about the role of the Soviet Union in the events leading up to the beginning of [...]
1Dec2003 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Road to Liberty: Persuasion and Aggression
The author would like to thank Jan Lester and Paul Birch for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. This is drawn from a lecture given at FEE in February. I would like to highlight two diametrically opposed ideas that I believe can help clarify our notion of liberty. Any specific human action can [...]
1Jun2003 | Gene Callahan | 1 comment | Continued-
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