The Kamala Harris campaign announced today that it will present a plan to ban “price gouging” by food suppliers. In other words, the Harris campaign plans to mandate price controls.
Get ready for rising prices and shortages in meat and other groceries, because that’s where laws against “price gouging”—which are price controls—lead.
Albert J. Nock was one of Murray Rothbard’s favorite essayists, and for good reason; his erudition, clarity of thought, and wisdom make his works supremely edifying and a joy to read, and none more so than his Theory of Education in the United States (1932).
Modern complex economies are remarkably characterized by the social division of labor. Individuals of varying abilities, personalities, and specialized technical knowledge in pursuing their self-interests integrate themselves into this social system by voluntarily participating in the various stages of production and exchange of goods and services.
The freedom of speech is today threatened in the West to a degree not seen since the nineteenth-century classical liberals battled the censorious police states of the old conservative regimes.
The free-market liberals largely won that battle, yet everywhere that a ruling class knows it is both unpopular and outnumbered it will attempt to silence free speech.
[Editor’s note: In this 1835 essay, the great anti-slavery Jacksonian—and enemy of central bankers—William Leggett provides an early example of “secessionist abolitionism” in his call for embracing both secession and disunion. Leggett here makes two key claims.
There has been a notable resurgence in antitrust litigation aimed at fostering innovation through the potential positive spillovers of technology to other firms.
Later this week, Kamala Harris is expected to break her campaign’s strange silence about policy by unveiling much of her economic platform.
“Democracy” is one of those terms that is essentially useless unless the one using the word first defines his terms. After all, the term “democratic” can mean anything from small-scale direct democracy to the mega-elections we see in today’s huge constitutional states. Among the modern social-democratic Left, the term often just means “something I like.”
