Free Markets

Progressives sell state intervention into economic affairs as “protecting” consumers and workers. In all cases, free markets do a better job of protecting all participants.

"A truly free market is totally incompatible with the existence of a State, an institution that presumes to 'defend' person and property by itself subsisting on the unilateral coercion against private property known as taxation."

Ever since independence more than 40 years ago, Zimbabwe has been wracked with socialism, inflation, and corrupt political leadership. Yet, there is a way forward for the nation, if Austrian Economics can be in its future.

Charles Dickens trained many to hate capitalism, but he never understood the difference between envious hatred of wealth and charitable concern for the poor. The true story of his personal life makes this evident.

Consumer spending does not drive the economy. On the contrary, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship are the critical components of economic growth.

Losing one’s money, credit cards, and passports in a New York City cab could have been a disaster. Thanks to trust and cooperation among people who didn’t know each other, this story had a happy ending.

“Equality imposed by force,” Chrysostom insists, “would achieve nothing, and do much harm.”

American journalists and academics have invented a fairy tale in which “free market orthodoxy” has dominated political thinking in America for the past forty years. This is not even slightly true, but pundits repeat the lie again and again.

Libertarianism and free markets depend upon peace. Murray Rothbard believed that war destroys freedom and free exchange, so keeping the peace is vitally important.

Connor O’Keeffe explains why the New Right’s economic populists have adopted a progressive myth of “laissez-faire gone wrong,” and instead shows how a century of inflation, bailouts, regulation, and managed trade has rigged the system against younger Americans.