Ben O'Neill

Dr. Ben O’Neill is a statistician and economist.

Latest work

Mises Daily Ben O'Neill
There was a time when the advocates of socialism argued that it would lead man to material abundance, whereas free-market capitalism would lead only to increasing misery and would ultimately collapse under its own internal stresses. You don't hear that too much these days, and for good reason. A century of empirical evidence has shown the contrary — that the free market leads to increasing wealth and material freedom, while socialism leads us only to poverty, state supremacy, and ultimately, mass murder. These days the attack has shifted. Capitalism does not lead us to poverty; it leads us to too much wealth. This makes us "greedy" and "materialistic." It leads us to excessive "consumerism."
Mises Daily Ben O'Neill
With the almost constant statist apologetics we hear from many government and academic economists, it is hard to believe that the discipline of economics was once a thorn in the side of the state and its political elite. So commonplace are fallacious economic arguments advocating state control that it sometimes seems that refutation of all of these arguments has become a case of cutting the heads off the Hydra — a tiring and fruitless endeavor. But if economics is to become an instrument of freedom and prosperity instead of an instrument of statism, then there are certain fundamental fallacies that must be continually challenged and discredited. Chief among these is the persistent non sequitur from externality to coercion — that is, the bogus conclusion that coercion is a proper means to solve problems involving economic externalities.