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Economic Ideas: Adam Smith on Free Trade, Crony Capitalism, and the Benefits from Commercial Society

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Adam Smith’s central contribution to economic understanding was surely his demonstration that under an institutional arrangement of individual liberty, property rights, and voluntary exchange the self-interested conduct of market participants could be shown to be consistent with a general betterment of the human condition. The emergence of a social system of division of labor makes men interdependent for the necessities, ...

Power to the People: John Lennon’s Legacy Lives On

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“You gotta remember, establishment, it’s just a name for evil. The monster doesn’t care whether it kills all the students or whether there’s a revolution. It’s not thinking logically, it’s out of control.” — John Lennon (1969) Militant nonviolent resistance works. Peaceful, prolonged protests work. Mass movements with huge numbers of participants work. Yes, America, it is possible to use occupations ...

Economics Ideas: David Hume on Self-Coordinating and Correcting Market Processes

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David Hume was one of the most prominent of the Scottish Moral Philosophers. He is particularly famous as a philosophical skeptic, who, in his book, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), questioned whether man’s reason and reasoning ability could successfully apprehend reality with any complete degree of certainty. He also argued that reason followed men’s “passions,” rather than reason ...