Free Market

Missing the Point about Flourishing

by Kevin Carson March 1, 2015

Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change Movement by Edmund Phelps (Princeton University Press 2013), 392 pages. Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps evaluates economic systems with a view to how they promote human prosperity, or “flourishing”: engagement, meeting challenges, self-expression, and personal growth.... A person’s flourishing comes from the experience of the new: new situations, new problems, ...

The Real Story Remains Untold

by Kevin Carson February 1, 2015

Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution by Emma Griffin (Yale University Press 2013), 320 pages). Emma Griffin calls this a “People’s History of the Industrial Revolution,” and uses documentation of much the same kind as E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class — a work she explicitly frames her work as a ...

Nothing to Fear from New Technologies If the Market Is Free

by Kevin Carson January 1, 2015

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (W.W. Norton & Company 2014), 320 pages. The subject of this book is the “second machine age,” in which “computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power — the ability to use our brains to understand ...

I Love Loosies and the People Who Sell Them

by Sheldon Richman December 10, 2014

The cops who ganged up on Eric Garner, got him into a chokehold, and mashed his face into the sidewalk didn’t intend to kill him. They intended only to show him who’s boss on the streets of Staten Island — and show him in a way he would never forget. As a Facebook friend of mine put it, instead they ...

Ignoring the Difference between Free markets and State Capitalism

by Kevin Carson December 1, 2014

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (Belknap 2014), 696 pages. The basic phenomenon that Thomas Piketty devotes this book to describing is simple: “When the rate of return on capital significantly exceeds the growth rate of the economy..., then it logically follows that inherited wealth grows faster than output and income.” His historical account ...

TGIF: Free-Market Socialism

by Sheldon Richman November 14, 2014

Libertarians are individualists. But since individualist has many senses, that statement isn’t terribly informative. Does it mean that libertarians are social nonconformists on principle? Not at all. Some few libertarians may aspire to be, but most would see that as undesirable because it would obstruct their most important objectives. Lots of libertarian men have no problem wearing a jacket and ...

Stop Those Who Would Stop Uber

by Sheldon Richman November 11, 2014

The nerve of some people! Imagine coming to a city and doing business without first asking permission from local officials! That’s what Uber has done in cities all over the United States and Europe, and it’s created quite a storm among politicians and licensed taxi drivers, who have held up traffic in, among other places, Boston, London, and Paris just ...

The Miracle and Morality of the Market

by Richard M. Ebeling September 16, 2014

One of the great fallacies arrogantly believed in by those in political power is the notion that they can know enough to manage and command the lives of everyone in society with better results than if people are left to live their own lives as they freely choose. The fact is, there is far more in the world that successfully ...

Command Posts: Roads, Railroads, and State

by Joseph R. Stromberg September 1, 2014

As any viewer of the British Channel 4 Time Team series will have noticed, almost everywhere below Hadrian’s Wall that the archaeological team digs, they have a fair chance of finding an Imperial Roman road, or a local road leading to it. The Romans were great engineers and road builders (and not just in Britain). Roman roads were all ...

Government-Rigged Markets

by George Leef September 1, 2014

Crony Capitalism in America 2008 – 2012 by Hunter Lewis (AC2 Books 2013), 399 pages. Ayn Rand called it “the aristocracy of pull.” That was her term for the political-economic system in which people can get ahead (and even become exceptionally wealthy) by virtue of their connections with those in power, rather than by their work, innovations, and ...

Should the Export-Import Bank Be Reauthorized?

by Laurence M. Vance August 7, 2014

The Export-Import Bank is up for reauthorization again. Democrats and Republicans in Congress are divided against each other and among themselves as to reforms that should be imposed on the bank, and, to a lesser extent, whether the bank should be reauthorized at all. But before looking at the question of whether the Export-Import Bank should be reauthorized, we should ...

Leave Should Be Left to the Market

by Laurence M. Vance July 15, 2014

Democrats, liberals, progressives, and the White House Summit on Working Families don’t think the Family and Medical Leave Act goes far enough. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) was passed in 1993 by the 103rd Congress — the only Congress with a Democratic majority that Bill Clinton had. The legislation (H.R.1) ...