Mises Daily

It was largely by making the divine right of kings a laughing stock that the Enlightenment writers destroyed it. It is time for us to do the same thing to the divine right of the majority.

One of the most important principles of economics is that decisions are made at the margin, and one of the key problems in classical economics concerned the source of value.

In a nutshell, John Maynard Keynes held that one cannot have complete trust in a market economy, which is inherently unstable. If left free, the market economy could lead to self-destruction. Hence there is the need for governments and central banks to manage the economy.

There is, after all, a very keen similarity between Hamiltonian mercantilism — or an economy directed and controlled by government, supposedly "in the public interest" but in reality for the benefit of a privileged few — and the economic fascism of Italy (and Germany) of the 1920s and '30s.

The Austrian school is the only school of thought built on a solid foundation. The Austrian school's a priori knowledge is apodictically true, and not subject to time or place.

Contrary to what Weisberg claims, the philosophy of freedom has, once again, been proven right.

The principal criticism of anarchism posed by the minarchists here represented is that a free society requires an objective, uniform law code, a demand anarchism cannot satisfy.

Bankruptcy is a normal part of economic life, covered by laws that guarantee stockholders will be compensated as much as possible.

The state punishes those who do good (those who provide services that customers are willing to pay for at a price they are willing to pay) and rewards those who do evil (those who use the coercive power of the state to prevent people from entering the marketplace and earning a living).

And so it happened that Birmingham became "emphatically the town of 'free trade'," where practically no restrictions, commercial or municipal, were known" (Timmins 1866, p. ??), and where the notion of free trade was even to be extended, however briefly, to the nation's coinage.