The Free Market

Few topics in recent years have aroused as much interest among libertarians as intellectual property. What place, if any, would IP — patents, copyrights, trademarks and the like — have in a libertarian society?

The economics profession acknowledges Menger’s place due to his contribution to the Marginalist Revolution in the 1870s, it otherwise ignores him because his theoretical framework does not lend itself to policy prescriptions.

Entrepreneurship is the driving force of a market economy, and that entrepreneurs need property rights, the rule of law, sound money, and free and open competition to be successful.

The Free Market 32, no.

These so-called sweatshops are part of the development process that leads to better conditions. Austrian economic theory teaches that people choose purposively to improve their situation.

In recent years, we’ve seen more and more Austrian-tinged economic analysis. There has been tremendous growth in interest in Austrian economics among financial professionals.

The Free Market 32, no.

Argentina’s economic minister, Axel Kicillof, has become famous for his assertion that it is possible to centrally manage the economy now because we have spreadsheets.

People during the presidential campaigns spoke of a Ron Paul Revolution. But without a revolution in education, there can be no Revolution.

Air travelers were outraged when the FAA announced that there would be flight delays because air-traffic controllers had to take furloughs as a result of sequester budget cuts. But there is another federal agency whose budget cuts Americans should be cheering—the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The Free Market 31, no. 8 (August 2013)

Greenspan took the Federal Reserve, which for years had been run by far more cautious and conservative men, and turned it into a machine for fine-tuning every aspect of the economy.

David Gordon gives a review of John R Lott's At the Brink: Will Obama Push Us Over the Edge?.

The real problem in our current regulated market is that due to government intervention in a cartelized tire industry, we now pay more for tires and there are fewer of them.

The Free Market 31, no. 4 (April 2013)

During the 2012 presidential campaign, President Obama made his now famous claim that “you didn’t build that” in reference to the infrastructure that businesses use to provide goods and services to customers.

The Free Market 31, no. 2 (February 2013)

The first Transcontinental’s were all creatures, not of capitalism or the private markets, but of government.

Crony capitalism and Keynesianism are just two sides of the same debased coin.

Celebrating anniversaries for the Austrian School of economics. One hundred years ago, Ludwig von Mises began his career as an intellectual leader and creative genius with his groundbreaking The Theory of Money and Credit. Fifty years ago, Murray Rothbard took his own place in the ranks of creative geniuses, and inaugurated the modern Austrian movement with his great treatise Man, Economy, and State. And thirty years ago, Lew Rockwell, with the help of Margit von Mises, Murray Rothbard, F.A. Hayek, Henry Hazlitt, Ron Paul, and heroic donors, created the first institution solely dedicated to Austrian economics, the Ludwig von Mises Institute.