Free Market

Vox Gets It Half Right on Paying Kidney Donors

by Laurence M. Vance October 15, 2024

Writing for the left-leaning media outlet Vox, Dylan Matthews makes the moral case for paying kidney donors. Matthews, a kidney donor who has written for the Washington Post, the New Republic, The American Prospect, and Slate, is a senior correspondent and lead writer for Future Perfect, “Vox’s section that tells stories about people and ...

“Who Will Build the Roads?” Part 2

by Wendy McElroy July 1, 2024

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 The United States Pharmacopeia is updated and published to this day. The organization has remained a privately funded nonprofit for over two centuries, but it does now currently cooperate closely with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). It is interesting to note, however, that it took the government 86 years ...

“Who Will Build the Roads?” Part 1

by Wendy McElroy June 1, 2024

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Everyone who argues for the free market over government involvement in the economy has heard this common comeback: “Who will build the roads?” Sometimes, the question is sincere and deserves to be answered with patience. Much of the time, however, it is the dismissal of a complex argument and is intended ...

You’re Not Fired

by Laurence M. Vance October 3, 2023

At the end of every episode of “The Apprentice,” Donald Trump’s reality TV show, he would utter his signature catchphrase “You’re Fired!” Yet, it came as no surprise that Trump, when speaking recently in Michigan, where the United Auto Workers (UAW) recently went on strike, didn’t dare mention anyone being fired for refusing to work. UAW members voted about 97 ...

The Free Market Can and Should Be Absolute

by Laurence M. Vance December 1, 2022

The 1932 Democratic Party platform advocated “the removal of government from all fields of private enterprise except where necessary to develop public works and natural resources in the common interest.” But since the advent of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal — a raw deal for Americans that raised taxes; forced most manufacturing industries into cartels with codes that regulated prices; paid ...

Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich, Part 2

by George Leef July 1, 2022

Part 1 | Part 2 Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich — How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden (University of Chicago Press, 2020). McCloskey and Carden also devote many chapters to refuting mistaken ideas about the reasons for the Great Enrichment. Many economists have explained it as a ...

Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich, Part 1

by George Leef June 1, 2022

Part 1 | Part 2 Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich — How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Art Carden (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Throughout almost all of human history, people lived miserably — far worse than even Thomas Hobbes famously said. Improvements? There weren’t any. Happiness? That ...

Human Irrationality and Free Markets

by Antony Sammeroff May 1, 2022

If everyone was irrational all of the time, we would be in big trouble. You’d never know when someone was suddenly going to swerve off the road for no apparent reason and drive into a building, or start babbling to you in tongues over the phone when all you wanted to do was order a pizza. That being said, people ...

Privatize Infrastructure

by Scott McPherson March 4, 2022

Two seemingly unrelated commentaries, from separate sources and published two weeks apart, reveal everything wrong with expensive (and never-ending) infrastructure spending and provide a glimpse at the reasons government shouldn't be in that business to begin with. Better understanding of government's proper role in the lives of a free people might also help with the issue ...

Once Again, There’s No Such Thing as Market Fundamentalism

by George Leef November 12, 2021

In September 2021, I wrote a two-part article for Future of Freedom entitled “There’s No Such Thing as Market Fundamentalism.” My argument was that people who say that those of us who favor liberty are just “fundamentalists” are mistaken. Fundamentalist thinking involves the acceptance of some belief simply because some authority has said that it is ...

Resisting the Market Process Undermines Freedom and Prosperity

by Richard M. Ebeling November 1, 2021

The free market often seems a hard sell. The resistance and opposition to its seemingly straightforward case emerges and persists, over and over again. It is all very strange, since, after all, how many people do not want the personal liberty to make their own choices about what to buy, where to live, and the amount they are willing ...

There’s No Such Thing as “Market Fundamentalism,” Part 1

by George Leef August 1, 2021

Part 1 | Part 2 Zealots who want to force others to conform to their beliefs often exhibit a fundamentalist mindset. That is to say, they are utterly certain of the rectitude of their beliefs on the basis of some unchallengeable text, either sacred or secular. They assert what they believe to be true rather than engage in rational ...