If you ever visited my part of the country, you would likely hear about a long-standing controversy over occupational taxes and the right of my state’s most populous county to impose them.

That state would be Alabama, and that county would be Jefferson County, established through violent, extramarket means in 1819 yet named for an antitax radical who eventually became the third president of the United States. Although Thomas Jefferson would die five years later, his eponymous county is still with us.

[This article is excerpted from The Positive Theory of Capital, book 3, chapter 2, “Nature and Origin of Subjective Value.”]

It is bad enough that opponents of the free market wrongly blame capitalism for environmental pollution, depressions, and wars. Whatever the failings of their causal theories, at least they are focused on undoubtedly bad things. We have really gone beyond the pale, though, when the market is blamed for something good.

Historian Michael Rostovtzeff and economist Ludwig von Mises both argued that unsound economic policies played a key role in the impoverishment and decay of the Roman Empire.

TUCSON, Ariz., June 4, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The late libertarian economist Murray Rothbard wrote that laws are generally passed to grant some privilege to those who advocate them. So we must always ask “Who benefits?” writes G.