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Free Trade Is Fair Trade

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As relayed by Harvard economics professor and chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw, “The Princeton economist Alan Blinder once proposed Murphy’s Law of economic policy: ‘Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least and disagree most vehemently.’” The quintessential example of this phenomenon is the near-unanimity of economists from across the political spectrum on the benefits of international free trade to participants in any country engaging in it. Opposition to free trade is political. Arguments against free trade — usually made by special-interest groups who stand to benefit the most from some form of protectionism — are generally nationalistic in tone, with an anti-foreign and anti-market bias cloaked in an appalling ignorance of basic economics. Modern American opponents of free trade, like the mercantilists of old, favor exports while at the same time ...

Praxeology and Hostile Action

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Praxeology according to Mises Ludwig von Mises saw praxeology — “the general theory of human action” — as the foundation of proper economic reasoning. Starting from the self-evident fact that men “act” so as to substitute more satisfactory states of affairs for those now existing, he believed he could build the basic toolkit of economic science by working deductively from secure first principles and their necessary implications, bringing in empirical data as needed. (See Human Action.) Mises cited the French social philosopher Alfred V. Espinas (1844–1922) as the first writer to use the term “praxeology” (1890). (Actually, as Guido Hülsmann has noted, Louis Bourdeau used it in 1882.) In his Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science (1962) Mises called history and praxeology “the two branches of the sciences of human action.” So far, a completed praxeology existed only within economics, but Polish philosopher Tadeusz Kotarbiński was working on a “praxeological theory of conflict and war.” Mises’s disciple Murray Rothbard enumerated the sciences of ...

All the Ways You Can Comply and Still Die During An Encounter with Police

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“Police are specialists in violence. They are armed, trained, and authorized to use force. With varying degrees of subtlety, this colors their every action. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent.”—Author Kristian Williams How do you protect yourself from flying fists, choking hands, disabling electrified darts and killing bullets? How do you defend yourself against individuals who have been indoctrinated into believing that they are superior to you, that their word is law, and that they have the power to take your life? Most of all, how can you maintain the illusion of freedom when daily, Americans are being shot, stripped, searched, choked, beaten and tasered by police for little more than daring to frown, smile, question, challenge an order or just exist? The short answer: you can’t. Now for the long answer, which is far more complicated but still leaves us feeling hopeless, ...

Economic Ideas: Mercantilism as Monarchy’s Planned Economy

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The Feudal System had resulted in the disintegration of the unity that much of Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe had known under the Roman Empire. Following the fall of Rome, Europe was divided into local and regional political and economic entities, each politically functioning and economically surviving in high degrees of isolation from each other. However, beginning in the fifteenth ...

Economic Ideas: Bernard Mandeville and the Social Betterment Arising from Private Vices

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One of the major turning points in social and economic understanding emerged in the 1700s with the theory of social order without human design. Before the eighteenth century, most social theory presumed or took as a working assumption that human society had its origin and sustainability in the creation of social institutions through either “divine” intervention, or by human ...