Interventionism

In this 90-minute 1981 lecture, Walter Block discusses the importance of allowing private markets — and not government planners — to decide how land and housing is used by those who buy, sell, and rent it.

Regulation is simply the way in which self-interested public officials provide benefits to self-interested individuals who form interest groups. This is as true in land use as in anything else.

In a slave system, threats of brutality underlay the whole relationship.

Hostilities in the North Atlantic provided the context — or rather, pretext — for America's participation.

There were three important victories related to cannabis, i.e., marijuana, legalization and only the most radical measure failed.

The Ron Paul of his era, Richard Overton, in both word and deed, was a fearless man, true to his ideals of justice, without regard for personal consequence.

The characteristic mark of economic history under capitalism is unceasing economic progress, a steady increase in the quantity of capital goods available, and a continuous trend toward an improvement in the general standard of living.

It is not co-ownership per se that causes moral hazards. They are caused by the uninvited and unwanted co-ownership that springs from interventionism.

The shorter work week is entirely a capitalist invention. As capital investment caused the marginal productivity of labor to increase over time, less labor was required to produce the same levels of output.

In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal “cradle-to-grave” healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. The disastrous results speak for themselves.