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Beware Grand Inquisitors and Psychology Professors

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For some people, there are a limitless number of reasons individual freedom is not the great good libertarians believe it to be. The “in” reason at the moment is that freedom to choose among a large number of options makes people unhappy. The leading theoretician among the choice-is-bad set is Barry Schwartz, professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. He is also the author of The Costs of Living: How Market Freedom Erodes the Best Things in Life. You get his drift. Schwartz sums up his outlook this way: “For many people, increased choice can lead to a decrease in satisfaction. Too many options can result in paralysis, not liberation.” For this reason, he is unimpressed by arguments that cutting back government programs is a good thing because it will ...

Bureaucracy: A Mises Classic, Part 2

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Part 1 | Part 2 Last month I discussed Ludwig von Mises’s presentation of profit management in his great little book Bureaucracy. He explains in detail how consumers “use” the price and profit-and-loss systems to direct entrepreneurs toward producing the things they want most urgently. (Of course, they don’t self-consciously use these systems; they simply buy and abstain from buying in order to best satisfy their needs.) Nothing matches this arrangement — which we call the free market, or capitalism — for delivering the goods and services that make our lives better and more comfortable. Mises goes to the trouble of describing profit management so he can contrast it with bureaucratic management, or government administration. It would be a mistake to conclude that Mises was anti-bureaucracy. As an advocate of limited government, he can be said to have been an advocate of limited bureaucracy. He opposed ...

Examining Reagan’s Record on Free Trade

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The following article originally appeared in the May 10, 1982, issue of The Wall Street Journal. Copyright Dow Jones and Company, Inc. Reprinted by permission. Hardly anyone was surprised when the Reagan administration imposed quotas on sugar imports last week. This is at once remarkable and understandable. It’s remarkable because Mr. Reagan wants to be known as a free-trader. Indeed, he lists as heroes some of history’s foremost free-traders: Frederic Bastiat, Richard Cobden, Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek, all of whom would find import quotas odious. And yet the blasé response is understandable because the imposition of quotas is consistent with the Reagan record and the neo-mercantilism of his predecessors (he had already raised the basic tariff on sugar imports and imposed a new import fee). Historians certainly weren’t surprised; the Republicans are ...