The Free Market 18, no. 8 (August 2000)

The Free Market 18, no. 9 (September 2000)

The Free Market 18, no. 9 (September 2000)

For two years, the White House has been haranguing owners of large websites, telling them not to violate their visitors’ supposed right to privacy. Now, just on the face of it, this is absurd. The proper way to think about websites is as private property. When you go to a website, you are a visitor on someone else’s property; the owner has the right to record what interests you. If you don’t like it, you shouldn’t visit. It’s that simple. 

The Free Market 18, no. 9 (September 2000)

Dictatorships always immediately ban short selling,” wrote Fred Schwed, Jr., in his fun 1940 book on investing, “since it is axiomatic with them that no professional pessimists are going to be tolerated.” Indeed, the long-vilified bearish practice called short selling involves a sale of borrowed stock with the anticipation that its price will fall, allowing the bear to buy it back and pocket the difference. When a bear buys back stock he has sold short, he is said to cover his position. 

The Free Market 18, no. 9 (September 2000)

The Free Market 18, no. 10 (October 2000)

On the Internet, a war between government-backed trademark holders and small web entrepreneurs is heating up. Thanks to the current managers of the Internet and a little-known agency of the United Nations, the trademark holders are winning. 

The Free Market 18, no. 10 (October 2000)

The Heritage Foundation is no flaming libertarian organization. Not for them the radical privatization of such things as bodies of water, roads, even social security, much less courts, armies, and police. 

The Free Market 18, no. 10 (October 2000)

Both Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek were called upon during wartime to weigh in on the question: what is the best economic policy in the conduct of war? Both were opposed to using war as a device for socializing the economy. If a war must be waged, they argued in their roles as value-free economists, better to contract-out the building of munitions to private companies rather than attempt to do it through nationalization and administrative edict. 

The Free Market 18, no. 10 (October 2000)

Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal is excited. The leftist columnist believes that he has found a wonderful “Third Way” example of using government to help poor people without the whole thing becoming yet another socialist giveaway. However, as with most government schemes that Hunt and his statist media colleagues like to tout, the latest example of “social entrepreneurship” is simply another fraud at worst and a misuse of resources at best. 

The Free Market 18, no. 11 (November 2000)

[Editorial Note: Recent protests in France over high gasoline taxes are not without historical precedent. Writes Justin Raimondo: The [g]ilet jaunes of today are the Poujadists of yesteryear.