In End the Fed, Ron Paul writes:

It is of the first importance for the American to grasp the full seriousness of this fact — that the great boon of human freedom has, in the long record of thousands of years, been enjoyed by a mere fraction of the people and for only a brief moment in history.

The buyers do not pay for the toil and trouble the worker took nor for the length of time he spent in working. They pay for the products.

The Mont Pèlerin Society had begun as an “ecumenical” undertaking, bringing together purebred liberals of the classical tradition and neoliberals, who endorsed interventionist schemes to one degree or another. From the beginning, Mises had been skeptical about the ecumenical concept, but for the first five or six years his apprehensions seemed unwarranted, even though the organization of all Mont Pèlerin activities lay in the hands of a devout neoliberal: Albert Hunold from Switzerland, whom Mises had first met at the 1928 Zurich meeting of the Verein für Sozialpolitik.

[Day 13 of Robert Wenzel’s 30-day reading list that will lead you to become a knowledgeable libertarian, this article is excerpted from The Logic of Action One: Method, Money, and the Austrian School (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 1997), pp. 58–77. It appeared on LewRockwell.com

In the modern world, a country’s natural resources have very little to do whether goods are on the nation’s shelves for people to buy. Singapore isn’t rich in resources, neither is Hong Kong, but both have vibrant market economies and shoppers can find whatever their collective heart’s desire on the shelves of stores in these two cities.