It is ideas that determine what people consider as their interests. Free men do not act in accordance with their interests. They act in accordance with what they believe furthers their interests.
It is theoretically conceivable but scarcely likely that the ruling class will rush to embrace a philosophy and a political economy that will end their power and put them, in effect, out of business.
Spencer was warning of the coming slavery in 1884, and George Orwell, in our time, has predicted that the full consummation of this slavery will be reached in 1984, exactly one century later.
"Unfortunately, I have lived long enough to know that history is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such."
Murray Rothbard details the forgotten history of radical individualist thought in the US. Colonial America did not set out deliberately to be the land of the free.
A mini-treatise by Murray Rothbard on the market economy, socialism, peace, the economics of Jefferson, and much more.
In a totalitarian system, competition means courting the favor of those in power. In the market system, competition means sellers try to outdo one another by offering better or cheaper goods and services to the buyers.
Murray Rothbard explains that anarcho-communists' longing for a preindustrial primitivism would mean starvation and death for nearly all of mankind and a grinding subsistence for the ones remaining.
The Left has an enormous desire to "do good to" the mass of other people. But since many people often resist, the leftist inevitably ends by reaching for the big stick with which to push the ungrateful masses around.
Keynes's "greatest achievement," according to his admirers, was his famous "refutation" of Say's law. Yet Say's law actually remains more relevant than ever.
