The hordes of mortgage defaults and foreclosures that occurred in the “sub-prime” housing market during the “Great Recession” was the direct result of the Fed’s “easy money” policy along with thirty years of government policy that forced mortgage lenders to make bad loans to un-creditworthy borrowers.

An important reason why so many state and local governments in the U.S. seem to be in a perpetual state of financial crisis with their politicians constantly scheming to raise hidden (and not-so-hidden) taxes is that they provide most of their so-called “services” through unionized government-run monopolies.

Imagine starting up a coffee shop that becomes successful and profitable. Then imagine that, as is par for the course in competitive markets, competing coffee shops pop up and begin competing for your customers with lower prices.

Ludwig von Mises wrote in his treatise, Human Action, that the main ideological foundation of labor unionism, and of government labor policy that is based on it, consists of such “garbled ideas” as the myth that employers have “superior bargaining power” over workers.

In Human Action Ludwig von Mises wrote that, in his time, labor unions had always been the primary source of anti-capitalistic propaganda. Your author was reminded of this by a bumper sticker that read: “The Union Movement: The People Who Brought You the Weekend.”

Beginning in the 1990s it became an article of faith among countless college students (and many others) that Walmart was an evil institution that no decent person should ever do business with. Guest speakers appeared on campuses all throughout America to denounce Walmart’s alleged oppression of the poor and the working class. It was all a part of a union-organized smear campaign directed mainly at non-union Walmart employees.

One of the oldest myths about capitalism is the notion that factories that offer the poor higher wages to lure them off the streets (and lives of begging, stealing, prostitution, or worse) or away from back-breaking farm labor somehow impoverishes and exploits them.

The late nineteenth century is often referred to as the time of the “robber barons.” It is a staple of history books to attach this derogatory phrase to such figures as John D. Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the nineteenth-century railroad operators such as Grenville Dodge, Leland Stanford, Henry Villard, James J. Hill, and others. To most historians writing on this period, these entrepreneurs committed thinly veiled acts of larceny to enrich themselves at the expense of their customers.