One of Josiah Child's main deviations from free-market and laissez-faire doctrine was to agitate for one of the favorite programs of the mercantilists — to push the legal maximum rate of interest ever lower. Formerly discredited "usury laws" were making a comeback on faulty economic rather than natural-law or theological grounds.
The question of questions for the politician should ever be "What type of social structure am I tending to produce?" But this is a question he never entertains, even though vast evidence exists that all legislation expands beyond its original intent.
The more historians and publicists worshiped and adored the greatness and the majesty of Franklin Roosevelt, the more they scorned his predecessor as the dour man in the high collar who tried but failed to thwart the nation's ascension to paradise.
He understood economic relationships, and he saw that such economic concepts as scarcity, price, profit, and investment have implications that go far beyond the scope of economic behavior as ordinarily represented in works of "economic" or "social" fiction.
What if a president took a different direction and sought popularity by expanding rather than reducing liberty?
If we were to award a prize for “brilliancy” in the history of economic thought, it would surely go to Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, the
If we were to award a prize for "brilliancy" in the history of economic thought, it would surely go to Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, the baron de l'Aulne (1727–1781). His career in economics was brief but brilliant and in every way remarkable.
Recorded at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s Supporters Summit; Auburn, Alabama; 9 October 2010.
Mencken saw the implications of where his thinking was leading him and he acknowledged those implications frankly. "I am," he wrote in <em>The Smart Set</em> in 1922, "a libertarian of the most extreme variety."
The leading Baconian in political economy, who was also, fittingly, a pioneer in statistics and in the alleged science of “political arithmet
