Interventionism

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.

Bob Murphy interviews Rob Bradley, the world's leading expert in energy economics in the Austrian tradition.

The rulers of that period had far-reaching powers over the activities of their subjects, while individual liberties were largely submerged.

Even The New York Times now admits there is a deep state — and that it serves its own agenda while ignoring the elected civilian government.

The attack on the principles of the Rule of Law was part of the general movement away from liberalism which began about 1870. It came almost entirely from the intellectual leaders of the socialist movement.

The economic policy dominant in the Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries assumed that intervention in economic affairs was a proper function of government.

Bob Murphy and Mark Thornton discuss the various ways in which government intervention masked slavery's inefficiency in the American South.

Unfortunately, some people prefer to attribute the cause of inflation not to an increase in the quantity of money but to the rise in prices.