Economic Freedom

Ryan and Tho discuss the media campaign around Joseph Stiglitz's new book, The Road to Freedom. 

Individual rights originated in Western thinking. Today, it is the West that produces the ruling class that disdains individual rights and replaces them with collectivism.

In publicly opposing apartheid, William H. Hutt saw how legal segregation kept black South Africans from pursuing legitimate economic goals. To Hutt, apartheid deprived people of equality of economic opportunity, which kept them in poverty.

In our current age of rampant monetary inflation and price inflation, good economics has become more relevant for ordinary people. Inflation is not some arcane matter of consumer price indices and statistics on the monetary base. Inflation, is simply ruinous on the personal level.

Progressives claim that profits are an unjust transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. In reality, entrepreneurs earn profits by directing resources from less valued to more valued uses to satisfy consumer needs.

After the Indochina War, Vietnam was one of the poorest countries in the world, but dramatic free-market reforms have made this formerly socialist country prosperous.

While chattel slavery exists in some parts of the world, it mostly has been abolished. Perhaps we should do the same thing to the state.

The enemies of individual liberty are numerous, from leftists who see freedom as interfering with the “positive freedoms” offered by the state to conservatives that believe too much freedom destroys community relationships. 

Conservatives and utilitarian classical liberals support freedom of contract because they deem it "useful" to society. However, Murray Rothbard believed that contractual freedom should be based upon the natural right of self-ownership.

Individual rights originated in Western thinking. Today, it is the West that produces the ruling class that disdains individual rights and replaces them with collectivism.