Why Wal-Mart Matters

The popular debate over Wal-Mart is an important part of a broader debate between freedom and interventionism, writes Art Carden. The company produces products people want to buy at low prices. It is better able to serve consumers. That is the source of its success. Those who vilify Wal-Mart do so not for Wal-Mart’s political failings but for Wal-Mart’s economic successes. The company’s critics are making inroads, but the anti-Wal-Mart campaign is a campaign to strangle a goose that has laid a disproportionate share of golden eggs.

Microcredit or Macrowelfare: The Myth of Grameen

Pundits left, right, and center appear to love the Nobel Prize winning bank and its founder, writes Jeffrey Tucker. The literature on Grameen is an echo chamber of hurrahs. Not even the Nobel Committee bother looking more deeply. Actually a closer look at this institution shows not a success but precisely the sort of flop you might expect from a government-subsidized program that is predicated on the view that money alone is the answer to poverty. What Bangladesh needs is not more personal indebtedness but radical economic reform.

Free Money Against “Inflation Bias”

From the Austrian point of view, write Thorsten Polleit, a government controlled money supply system, coupled with the price level stabilization idea, is inherently crisis prone, irrespective of inflation targeting or deflation targeting. That is why Austrians argue for an unconditional return to free-market money. They see it as a solution to the dangers emerging from today’s monetary regime.
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