Free Market

Romney and Bain Capital

by Sheldon Richman May 25, 2012

Presumptive Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is essentially playing one card in his quest for Barack Obama’s job: his business experience taught him how economies work. But Romney’s own pitch raises doubts about this. The Obama campaign charges Romney with destroying jobs when he ran Bain Capital, undercutting Romney’s claim he was a job creator. Obama argues that Bain created only ...

The Enclosure Acts and the Industrial Revolution

by Wendy McElroy March 8, 2012

They hang the man, and flog the woman, That steals the goose from off the common; But let the greater villain loose, That steals the common from the goose. — English folk poem An understanding of the Enclosure Acts is necessary to place aspects of the Industrial Revolution in their proper context. The Industrial Revolution is often accused of driving poor laborers en ...

In Praise of Parallel Institutions

by Wendy McElroy December 8, 2011

Globalization has been a buzzword for decades. The word has competing definitions: It can refer to the reduction of barriers to trade and travel, which allows goods, ideas, and people to act as though the world is one free-flowing community. But it can also refer to the centralization of power into a nexus from which policy decisions are broadcast ...

Economic Liberty and Its Abandonment, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger November 30, 2011

Part 1 | Part 2 With federal spending continuing to soar out of control, the obvious question arises: How do we get our nation back on the right track — toward economic prosperity and economic liberty? To answer that question, it’s helpful to examine basic principles, including the founding principles of our nation and how our country turned away ...

Capitalism and the Free Market, Part 2

by Sheldon Richman June 1, 2010

Part 1 | Part 2 The taint of government intervention into economic activity carried over to the British North American colonies. The radical nature of the American Revolution has masked the class struggle within American colonial society between what historian Merrill Jensen called “radicals” and “conservatives” in his book The Articles of Confederation: An Interpretation of the Social-Constitutional History ...

Book Review: The Mind and the Market

by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 2003

The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought by Jerry Z. Muller (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); 487pages; $30. In the 1920s and 1930s, the well-known Italian classical-liberal historian Guglielmo Ferrero attempted to explain the reasons for the social disruptions and civil wars that European society had gone through from the time of the French Revolution in 1789. ...

Book Review: In Defense of Free Capital Markets

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 2001

In Defense of Free Capital Markets: The Case against a New International Financial Architecture by David F. DeRosa (Princeton, N.J.: Bloomberg Press, 2001); 230 pages; $27.95. IN THE 1930s, during the high watermark of aggressive economic nationalism in Europe, one of the most effective political weapons of regulation used by governments was control over the buying and selling of currencies on ...

Book Review: From Subsistence to Exchange and Other Essays

by Richard M. Ebeling August 1, 2000

From Subsistence to Exchange and Other Essays by Peter Bauer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000); 153 pages; $24.95. FREE-MARKET ECONOMIST Peter T. Bauer is 85 years old this year. During the 55 years since the end of the Second World War, Bauer has been one of the most articulate and insightful critics of economic planning and government intervention in the ...

A-Scalping We van Gogh

by Sheldon Richman February 1, 1999

One of the most reviled characters in urban America is the scalper. He's the guy who buys tickets to an event, not for his own use, but to sell to others on the street. He is indeed reviled — until a person realizes that he's the only source of a coveted ticket. Then he's a lifesaver. After the event, the ...

Book Review: Free-Market Feminism

by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 1998

Free-Market Feminism by David Conway (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1998); 96 pages; £7.00. The Soviet Union may be gone, but the Marxian mindset still dominates the intellectual climate of the world. Many of the fashionable fads of our time are merely variations on Marx's conception of class conflict. The residues of socialism also still dominate the general understanding ...

The Price of Junk Science

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 1998

The Clinton administration knows how to add insult to injury. Not only is it committed to an environmental program that will interfere with individual liberty and sap the American economy of its vitality, it also refuses to level with the American people about the costs. At the global warming conference in Kyoto, Japan, the administration signed a treaty committing the ...