Economics

TGIF: Hayek’s Warning

by Sheldon Richman January 4, 2013

A little over 38 years ago F.A. Hayek, then in Stockholm, Sweden, to accept the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (popularly known as the Nobel Prize in economics), said, Economists are at this moment called upon to say how to extricate the free world from the serious threat of accelerating inflation which, ...

The Calling: Why “Rent-Seeking”?

by Steven Horwitz January 3, 2013

Public Choice theory, especially in the hands of James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, has given libertarians a very effective set of arguments against government intervention. In the face of cries of “market failure,” when real-world imperfect markets quite understandably fall short of the unrealistic model of perfect competition that mainstream economists use to portray free markets, the Public ...

TGIF: Intervention Begets Intervention

by Sheldon Richman December 21, 2012

Among the many valuable doctrines associated with the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises is his “critique of interventionism.” Originally published in German in 1929, then published in English in 1977, Mises’s book A Critique of Interventionism summed up his position this way: In a private property order isolated intervention fails to achieve what its sponsors ...

The Calling: The Private and the Public

by Steven Horwitz December 6, 2012

I am thrilled that I am able to bring “The Calling” to a new home here at The Future of Freedom Foundation, and equally happy to have my friend Sheldon Richman once again as its editor. For this first column in its new home, I want to look at another example of one of my favorite concerns for modern ...

The Goal Is Freedom: In Praise of Profit

by Sheldon Richman November 30, 2012

In the last two weeks, I presented a defense of key libertarian concepts — the market, private property, and competition — in a way intended to make them palatable to people who believe in individual liberty yet have something like an aesthetic aversion to the market economy. (See those articles here and here.) Today let’s examine profit, another ...

TGIF: The Virtues of Competition

by Sheldon Richman November 23, 2012

When I discussed reasons to esteem the free market last week, I conspicuously left out any reference to competition. That might have seemed strange, but I did it because the subject deserves its own treatment. Differing attitudes about market competition divide people needlessly. An appreciation of what competition makes possible could prepare the ground for a convergence ...

The Misplaced Fear of “Monopoly”

by Thomas E. Woods Jr. November 1, 2012

Those of us who get drawn, often against our better judgment, into Internet debates soon discover that the case against the market economy in the popular mind boils down to a few major claims. Here I intend to dissect one of them: under the unhampered market we’d be at the mercy of vicious monopolists. This fear can be attributed in ...

Meeting Frédéric Bastiat

by Martin Morse Wooster November 1, 2012

The Collected Works of Frédéric Bastiat. Volume 1: The Man and the Statesman: The Correspondence and Articles on Politics, Jacques de Guenin, general editor, and Jane Willems and Michael Willems, translators (Liberty Fund 2011); 600 pages. Of all the great classical liberal thinkers, Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) remains one of the least well-known. His works, of course, continue to be ...

An Economy of Illusions

by Tim Kelly October 11, 2012

For the past four years, talking heads, pundits, and other regime apologists have been looking for “green shoots” and other signs of an economic recovery to vindicate the U.S. government’s fiscal and monetary shenanigans. So when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released its report on October 5 showing the creation of 114,000 new jobs in September and a reduction ...

Destroying the Young with the Minimum Wage, Part 1

by Gregory Bresiger October 1, 2012

Part 1 | Part 2 The minimum wage, a price control as futile as all other government price controls, continues to damage the U.S. economy and much of the world. But the obscene irony of the minimum-wage law is that it hurts some of the very people it is supposedly designed to help — young people seeking employment. The government’s ...

More Markets? More Government? Wrong Question!

by Michael C. Munger September 10, 2012

Michael Munger is Professor of Political Science, and Director of the PPE Certificate Program. His primary research focus is on the functioning of markets and regulatory policies. His other work includes a variety of policy monographs and reports, for private organizations and government agencies at the federal, state, and local level. He has taught at Dartmouth College, University of ...

The Market and Uncertainty

by Sheldon Richman August 1, 2012

Relying on the mass media for accurate economic analysis is like relying on a mobile home for shelter from a tornado. It’s a rather bad idea. Two items in the news demonstrate this beyond a shadow of a doubt: JPMorgan Chase’s big loss last spring and the role of private equity in an economy. It’s widely believed that JPMorgan Chase’s ...