The Free Market

The only really proper reform of Social Security is the gradual abolition of the whole system.

The Austrian economists—Mises, Rothbard, and Hayek most prominently—were not alone in predicting the baneful effects of central banking and paper money.

Our times are much like the 1930s, when it was widely assumed that there were only two viable ideological positions: communism or fascism.

Politcal movements often find themselves hypnotized by the prospect of power and passively obeying the commands of the state to dance, sing, and otherwise perform according to the state’s bidding.

Has academia become so politicized that teaching good economics, and using politically sensitive illustrations, can lead to threats, fines, penalties, demotion and worse? It certainly seemed so in early February when Hans-Hermann Hoppe, a leading student of Murray Rothbard and senior fellow of the Mises Institute, received an egregious letter from the Provost of his university.

The concept of taxation well deserves its partnership with death. Death and taxes, you know. Two vultures. Both, to say the least, deadly.

In March of 2004 Microsoft was fined a record $648 million by the European Commission for exercising its (alleged) monopoly power in the operating systems market.

In the ten years between 1994 and 2004, a dramatic turn took place within the Republican Party. The themes of the 1994 election weren’t just about cutting government, though that was the central campaign promise of that generation of elected officials sent to Washington. The core was more revolutionary than that: it was a dogged commitment to full freedom philosophy forged in opposition to all the works of the central state.

Many economists mistakenly believe taxation can be good for economic growth, that war can buck up prosperity, and that even natural disasters can spur wealth creation by causing people to spend. All of this is fallacy because it fails to consider the costs of destruction, the alternative use of resources, and the unseen effects of diverted uses of property.

Rothbard was the leading student of Ludwig von Mises, an innovator in Austrian economics and libertarian political theory, and the intellectual inspiration for the Mises Institute from its founding in 1982 until his death.

The dollar may not die anytime soon but its capacity for lording it over all living things is ending.

Indeed, because a free market in space industries would be open to all competitors, we have every reason to expect technological innovation to be much quicker than in a monopolized space program.

It is the conviction of the liberal intellectual tradition dating back to the Middle Ages that society contains within itself the capacity for internal self-management. This is in contrast to the claims of the sociology literature, which posits that human society is riddled with conflict between groups: races, ages, ethnicities, and abilities.

Professor Mises had come to the United States in 1940 and joined the faculty of the Graduate School in 1945. At that time he had already published his Bureaucracy (1944) and Omnipotent Government (1944) and undoubtedly was laboring on his magnum opus, Human Action (1949) which built on its German-language predecessor Nationalökonomie.

Hans F. Sennholz, winner of the 2004 Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Liberty, is one of the handful of economists who dared defend free markets and sound money during the dark years before the Misesian revival.

If we continue to pay attention to authors like Schlosser and Ehrenreich who blame the free market for the problems we face, public support for the market will dwindle to less than it is already, and the prosperity that the free market generates will be destroyed.

It was capitalism that finally ended the Great Depression, not FDR’s harebrained cartel, wage-increasing, unionizing, and welfare state expanding policies.

The middle classes have always been the only dependable source for taxes. If a government really wants revenue, that is where they have to go. 

Price stability is a misleading and an inherently contradictory concept. When such a construct as the price index becomes the guiding post for central banks, they will tend to produce and reinforce the very instabilities they proclaim to fight.

The newest political cliché offered up by the Republicans speaks of the need for an "Ownership Society." To those of us who support private property, it might sound good at first. But let us think about this before embracing it.