Interventionism

Pascal Salin investigates the contrast between French collectivism and it production of liberal intellectuals.

How much licensing requirements are designed to “protect” the health of the public, and how much to restrict competition, may be gauged from the fact that giving medical advice free without a license is rarely a legal offense. Only the sale of medical advice requires a license.

It is true that if labor becomes more efficient, workers must find other uses for the time they now have available. But why is this a problem? Human beings have unlimited wants, and there are always new uses for human labor.

Presented at the Mises Institute's "First Annual Advanced Instructional Conference in Austrian Economics" at Stanford University.

Hazlitt and all of the other critics of Keynes never did get to the primary points with respect to what was wrong with Keynes. One point was theoretical. The other was practical.

Why does this domino process affect only banks, and not real estate, publishing, oil, or any other industry that may get into trouble?

Japan's once-envied economy is now in shambles. The European economy, built on the same shaky tenets, is crumbling, too. Where to go from here?

This immense cooperative system is known as a free-market economy. It was not consciously planned by anybody. It evolved.

The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration.

Many advocates claim government intervention is necessary because markets are too unstable. The real instability, however, comes from the immense uncertainty over what government will do next with its vast and arbitrary power.