“Fascism” has become a term of general derision and rebuke. It is tossed casually in the direction of anything a critic happens to dislike. Even libertarians—themselves the epitome of anti-fascism— have been called fascists from time to time. But fascism is a real concept, not a stick with wh...

The explanation of the free economic system constitutes a great architectural edifice. Starting from human action and its implications, proceeding to individual value scales and a money economy, we have demonstrated that the quantity of goods produced, the prices of consumers’ goods, the prices of productive factors, the interest rate, profits and losses, all can be explained by the same deductive apparatus.

Ever since the days of early classical economics, many writers have discussed “distribution theory” as if it were completely separate and isolated from production theory.69 Yet we have seen that “distribution” theory is simply production theory.

One very popular subdivision of economics has been “international trade.” In a purely free market, such as we are analyzing in the bulk of this work, there can be no such thing as an “international trade” problem. For nations might then possibly continue as cultural expressions, but not as economically meaningful units. Since there would be neither trade nor other barriers between nations nor currency differences, “international trade” would become a mere appendage to a general study of interspatial trade.

The net incomes in the economy accrue to labor in wages, to landowners in ground rents (both wages and ground rents being “rents,” i.e., unit-prices of productive factors), to capitalists in interest—all of which continue in the ERE—and profits and losses to entrepreneurs, which do not. (Ground rents are capitalized in the capital value of land, which therefore earns the interest rate in the ERE.) But what of the owners?

A particularly important category of laborer-entrepreneurs is that of the sellers of personal services to consumers. These laborers are generally capitalists as well.

We have seen that a musician or a doctor earns wages without being an employee; the wages of each are implicit in the income that he receives, even though they are received directly from the consumers.

In the free economy, there is an explicit time market, labor market, and land-rent market. It is clear that while chaos would ensue from a world of producers’ co-operatives, other critical points even before that would, as it were, introduce little bits of chaos into the productive system. Thus, suppose that workers are separated from capitalists, but that all capitalists own their own ground land. Further, suppose, that for one reason or another, no capitalist will be able to rent out his land to some other firm.