State interventions such as minimum wage laws and broader restrictions on economic freedom distort entrepreneurial calculation by altering price signals, labor costs, and incentives guiding resource allocation.
Politicians sell business regulation as benefiting consumers. In reality, as we saw from airline regulation, the system creates cartels that shut out consumers and benefit regulated businesses.
Murray Rothbard wrote many years ago that government regulation, ostensibly created to protect consumers, actually protects incumbent producers from competition. Decades later, nothing has changed.
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.
