How Free Is the “Free Market”?

Most of our daily experience in life is not with the Department of Labor or Interior or Education or Justice, writes Jeffrey Tucker. It is with Home Depot, McDonald’s, Kroger, and Pizza Hut. Our lives are spent dealing with the commercial sector mostly, because it is visible and accessible, whereas the depredations of the state are mostly abstract, and its destructive effects mostly unseen. We don’t see the inventions left on the shelf, the products not imported due to quotas, the people not working because of minimum wage laws, etc. Because of this, we are tempted to believe the unbelievable, namely that government serves the function only of a night watchman. And only by believing in such a fantasy can we possibly believe the second assumption, which is that the problems of our society are due the to the market economy, not to the government that has intervened in the market economy.

Can Unions Cause Price Inflation?

Central banks around the world have painted themselves into a corner as of late, as their plans for injecting hundreds of billions of dollars worth of credit into the financial markets butts up against their desire to avoid massive price increases. Rather than take the blame for this predicament, the financial central planners have characteristically started pointing fingers elsewhere.In the January 5–6 weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, we learn that it is apparently unions who are now at fault:

Setting the Stage for American History: Liberty versus Power in Europe and England

In 1495, on the death of Gianneto Berardi, who had contracted to fit out twelve ships, Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine who was manager of the Medici bank at Seville, assumed the contract. In succeeding years, Vespucci sailed in Spanish expeditions, and then from 1501 on sailed in Portuguese voyages to explore Cabral’s discovery, Brazil. Vespucci wrote accounts of his voyages; they were immediately printed and received wide circulation. As a result, the mapmakers irrevocably attached Amerigo’s name to the newly discovered continents.

Last Knight Live Blog 17 Kraus

Money and economic calculation in terms of money receipts and money outlays are indispensable elements in our daily economic lives. It is simply inconceivable to go about producing and consuming without using money and economic calculation in terms of money. The motivations of businessmen to invest in a new line or enlarge the existing line of production are determined by the difference between the money the business is projected to be spent and received. In short, their motivation is that of pursuing a money profit.
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