The Free Market 24, no. 4 (April 2004)

The Free Market 24, no. 5 (May 2004)

I am often asked about career paths for freedom lovers. How can one combine professional life with the advancement of liberty? Let’s admit at the outset that it is presumptuous to offer any answer since all jobs and careers in the market economy are subject to the forces of the division of labor. Because a person focuses on one task doesn’t mean that he or she isn’t great at many tasks; it means only that the highest productive gains for everyone come from dividing tasks up among many people of a wide range of talents.

The Free Market 24, no. 5 (May 2004)

That some factors of production are mobile, says the new protectionist, “proves” that free trade is not as attractive as (supposedly) David Ricardo argued. But factor mobility is not new. It has long been accepted by economists that either goods or people (and other factors of production) move. Indeed, part of the argument for free trade between Mexico and the US is that there would be a reduced problem of illegal immigration.

The Free Market 24, no. 5 (May 2004)

A popular economics textbook that I once had to use while working as an adjunct professor had a section on government regulation in which the authors likened it to the placement of a stop sign at a busy intersection or a rule that was meant to prevent individuals from behaving dishonestly.

The Free Market 24, no. 6 (June 2004)

You have surely played Parker Brothers’ board game Monopoly. It has been published in 26 languages and in 80 countries around the world. Since being introduced in 1935, in fact, an estimated one-half billion people have played it. It has taught the multitudes what they know about how an economy works.

The Free Market 24, no. 6 (June 2004)

It is always the fashion among many intellectuals to blame society’s ills on the free market. One college newspaper recently argued that the market is “The God That Sucked.” The course summaries in my university’s catalog, the themes of the lecture series, and the editorial content of the student newspapers suggest that many students and faculty would agree.

The Free Market 24, no. 6 (June 2004)

Outsourcing, offshoring, what- ever the name, has become a hot issue in this election year. (As I write these lines, the government has announced that 2,400,000 manufacturing jobs have disappeared in the last three years, currently leaving more than 9,000,000 Americans without jobs.)

The Free Market 24, no. 7 (July 2004)

The psychology of the anti-market left can be a puzzle, but even more confounding is the mentality of the anti-market right. There are agrarians, medievalists, and nationalists, and, above all, the neoconservatives, who dread the market as much as any socialist from days of yore. Their critique differs, but all complain about the strictures that economics places on the policy imagination. In fact, that is one of the merits of economics.

The Free Market 24, no. 6 (July 2004)

Jim Cantalupo was CEO and Chairman of McDonald’s when he died unexpectedly on April 19th. In the weeks that passed after his death, noted Don Boudreaux, McDonald’s continued to supply Big Macs, Egg McMuffins, and its other menu items to hordes of customers. No changes in McDonald’s operations were evident to the general public. The news of the death might sadden us, but it doesn’t cause us to worry about where our next hamburger will come from.

The Free Market 24, no. 7 (July 2004)

The Ludwig von Mises Institute has published a new edition of Murray N. Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State, and united this great treatise with Power and Market, which was originally written as the final section of the book but was published only eight years later.