Economics

The Calling: Markets Turn Waste into Want-Satisfaction

by Steven Horwitz June 20, 2013

A frequent criticism of markets is that private owners have every incentive to dump the waste byproducts of their production processes into the air, water, or land without concern about the harmful effects. More sophisticated critics understand the idea of negative externalities and love to jump up and down about how they demonstrate the need for government intervention. There ...

Marx, the Once “Anti-Communist,” Who Brought Socialist Ruin to the World

by Richard M. Ebeling June 5, 2013

Some people may have missed it on their calendar, but May 5th was Karl Marx's birthday. It is worth recalling, also, that there was a time when Marx was an anti-communist. Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in the German Rhineland town of Trier, and died on March 14, 1883 in London. It is said that by its fruit ...

Collapsing the Tent on the Mercantilist Revival

by Alexander William Salter June 1, 2013

Harvard professor Dani Rodrik’s recent mercantilist apology attempts to illustrate the unappreciated benefits of a much-maligned political-economic system: mercantilism. “Today, mercantilism is typically dismissed as an archaic and blatantly erroneous set of ideas about economic policy,” Rodrik acknowledges. Thus his essay provides a defense of this system, which he believes has much to offer ...

The Calling: The Problem with Political Heroes and Villains

by Steven Horwitz May 9, 2013

It’s sometimes hard to tell the coverage of politics from the coverage of sports. People seem to root for political parties as though they were sports teams, cheering Team Red or Team Blue on to victory with the same passion they bring to the Super Bowl. Individual team members are followed with the same intensity as are star players ...

The Calling: In Defense of Complex, Global, Fast Living

by Steven Horwitz May 2, 2013

In the wealthy Western world, many of the products we buy come from the far reaches of the earth, made by people we don’t know, with inputs about which we are ignorant. The increased number and variety of consumer products give us a range of choices that would boggle the minds of earlier generations. And technology enables us to ...

A Century of Economic Servitude

by Gregory Bresiger April 18, 2013

Americans pay taxes all year round — sales taxes, tolls, investment taxes, user fees, estimated taxes, et cetera. And most of them were paying more on April 15 one way or the other. That’s because at the tax-filing deadline, a slight majority of Americans owed more, according to the annual Capital One Tax and Savings Survey. Some 51 percent of ...

TGIF: The Market Is a Beautiful Thing

by Sheldon Richman April 12, 2013

Market advocates tend to respect the intellect of their fellow human beings. You can tell by their reliance on philosophical, moral, economic, and historical arguments when trying to persuade others. But what if most people’s aversion to the market isn’t founded in philosophy, morality, economics, or history? What if their objection is aesthetic? More and more I’ve come to think ...

Fixing the Broken Federal Budget (Video)

by David M. Primo April 9, 2013

On April 1, 2013, David Primo gave the following speech at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s Economic Liberty Lecture Series. The speech can viewed above in its entirety.

TGIF: The Myth of Market Failure

by Sheldon Richman April 5, 2013

In the language of economics, a market failure is, as David Friedman writes, “a situation where each individual correctly chooses the action that best accomplishes his objectives, yet the result is worse, in terms of those same objectives, than if everyone had done something else.” As a rule, the pursuit of individual good in the market ...

Progressives Believe in Money Magic

by Sheldon Richman April 2, 2013

It’s hard to believe that in the 21st century, educated people believe the government can produce real wealth by creating money. It’s especially ironic that the main preachers of this superstition fancy themselves progressives and are the first to accuse their opponents of being against science. What could be more antiscience than the alchemic proposal to create wealth ...

Living Economics (video)

by Peter J. Boettke April 2, 2013

The Future of Freedom Foundation is pleased to present "Living Economics," a talk by Peter J. Boettke with comments from FFF vice president Sheldon Richman and Chris Coyne, F.A. Harper Professor of Economics at George Mason University. This panel took place on March 27, 2013 at George Mason University at Arlington in Founder's ...

James Buchanan’s Subjectivist Economics

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 2013

James Buchanan, the Nobel laureate who died at 93 in January, was well known for his pioneering work in Public Choice (the application of economic principles to politics), constitutional economics (as a device for limiting government power), and many other key subjects in political economy. His voluminous work has long been of interest to libertarians and classical liberals for ...