Mises Daily

Rather, the popular debate over Wal-Mart is an important part of a broader debate between freedom and interventionism. Those who vilify Wal-Mart do so not for Wal-Mart's political failings but for Wal-Mart's economic successes.

At Thanksgiving, Americans recall their blessings around bountiful meals, with imagery going back to Pilgrim days, especially Plymouth Colony&#8217

Hayek argues that exceptionally intelligent people who favor the market tend to find opportunities for professional and financial success outside the Academy (i.e., in the business or professional world). Those who are highly intelligent but ill-disposed toward the market are more likely to choose an academic career. For this reason, the universities come to be filled with those intellectuals who were favorably disposed toward socialism from the beginning.

Perhaps most importantly, the very source of the crises would remain in place: the concept of "price index targeting," which rests on the erroneous "stabilization" idea, a concept that is in full contradiction to the notion of free markets: "Human action originates change. As far as there is human action there is no stability, but ceaseless alteration."

No government, no matter how tyrannical, maintains its power by force of arms alone. The ruled always greatly outnumber the rulers, and so government depends essentially on the acquiescence of the populace, an acquiescence it attempts to promote through patronage and propaganda.

Meanwhile, the taxpayers have no choice but to contribute toward these eternal reforms.

The Spanish Scholastics also anticipated the Austrian school in applying value theory to money, thus beginning the integration of money into general value theory. As de Roover wrote of Aquinas, 'These passages are clear and unambiguous; value depends upon utility, usefulness, or human wants. There is nowhere any mention of labor as the creator or the measure of value.

With few exceptions, American unions have long been at the forefront of anti-capitalist ideology and have supported virtually all the destructive tax and regulatory policies that have been so poisonous to American capitalism.

We must unmask the fact that they use the Federal Reserve to dupe the masses into supporting imperialism. The Fed must be stopped. Gold coins must return as our monetary standard. The ideas of the Austrian economists must prevail.

The best that Professor Yunus could do to help his country would be to use his now-considerable credibility to push for a freer market through radical privatization and free trade.