Free Market

The Union Devil Is in the Details

by Wendy McElroy May 9, 2014

Great attention has been focused on the exorbitant cost of the tax-funded pensions and other employee benefits of public-service unions. But the public costs of granting state-backed privileges to other, non-public-service unions are less visible, because they often occur on a local rather than a state or national level. One source of these costs is called a “Project ...

Does Intellectual Property Defy Human Nature?

by Joseph S. Diedrich April 15, 2014

A music-composition professor of mine once lamented that without copyright protection, Western civilization would cease to exist. Most of us take intellectual property (IP) for granted, assuming it is ethically and economically necessary. We’ve become so blasé about IP that heavy-handed FBI warnings and billion-dollar lawsuits don’t faze us in the slightest. Yet despite the unquestioned consensus, intellectual property ...

“Racist” Zip Codes

by Wendy McElroy April 1, 2014

A new type of social engineering is poised to descend on American communities: diversity mapping and the rectification of any racial inequities the mapping reveals. The campaign is meant to stamp out “geospatial discrimination.” The term refers to the fact that affluent neighborhoods tend to be dominated by whites and Asians. What government calls “protected minorities,” especially blacks, are relatively ...

FFF Webinar: Intellectual Property and Its Unlibertarian Consequences

by Sheldon Richman March 13, 2014

On Wednesday, March 12, 2014 FFF vice president and editor Sheldon Richman hosted a free, interactive online webinar entitled "Intellectual Property Consequences and Its Unlibertarian Consequences." This was an interactive experience with Sheldon and the participants. This video includes Sheldon's slides and the audio, but not the video feed.

TGIF: Intellectual Property Fosters Corporate Concentration

by Sheldon Richman January 10, 2014

The modern libertarian case against so-called intellectual property (IP) has been building steadily since the late 1980s, when I first encountered it. Since then, an impressive volume of work has been produced from many perspectives: economics, political economy, sociology, moral and political philosophy, history, and no doubt more. It is indeed a case to be reckoned with. ...

Mandela Wasn’t Radical Enough

by Sheldon Richman December 11, 2013

I suppose we will forever be subjected to incomplete accounts of the life of Nelson Mandela and the evil he struggled against. Both the Right and the Left (as conventionally defined in America) are too busy pushing agendas to provide the full story. On the establishment Right (with some honorable exceptions) apartheid was deemed unimportant in the context of the ...

A Flood of Government Intervention

by Laurence M. Vance November 4, 2013

Some Americans are outraged at the federal government for reasons other than the recent government shutdown. No, they are not outraged because the National Science Foundation is funding the development of card games, videos and other educational programs “to engage adult learners and inform public understanding and response to climate change” through the $5.7 million Polar Learning and ...

Gabriel Kolko Revisited, Part 2: Kolko Abroad

by Joseph R. Stromberg October 1, 2013

Part 1 | Part 2 Gabriel Kolko’s historical writing hinges on the interrelations of economic, political, and ideological power in American history. His later work increasingly focused on those phenomena in relation to war, peace, and empire. As his project went forward, Kolko increasingly departed from that Marxist framework in which state power becomes so utterly subordinate ...

Gabriel Kolko Revisited, Part 1: Kolko at Home

by Joseph R. Stromberg September 1, 2013

Part 1 | Part 2 An earlier generation of libertarians was interested in Gabriel Kolko, a historian of the Left. Who was he? Born in 1932 in Paterson, NJ, historian Gabriel Kolko studied at Kent State, the University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University (PhD: 1962). From 1970 until his retirement he taught history at York University in Toronto, ...

Book Review: The Moral Case for a Free Economy

by Laurence M. Vance August 1, 2013

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy by Robert Sirico (Regnery Publishing, 2012), 213 pages. Critics of the free market assert that it fails the underprivileged, leads to income inequality, exploits the poor, and is at times downright cruel. They charge its defenders with being motivated by greed, selfishness, and materialism, and making a god out ...

The Market Is a Beautiful Thing

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 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 on philosophy, morality, economics, or history? What if their objection is aesthetic? More and more I’ve come to think ...

Bangladeshi Workers Need Freed Markets

by Sheldon Richman May 22, 2013

Since November, more than a thousand Bangladeshi garment workers have perished in two tragic factory calamities: a fire in Tazreen and a building collapse in Savar, outside the capital, Dhaka. Bangladesh is a major exporter of apparel to the West and “is set to become the world’s largest apparel exporter over the next few years,” the Economist reports. ...