Free Markets

Crystal meth is a horrible drug, but it is also a cheap date, the poor man's cocaine. During cocaine's heyday, meth was nearly extinct on the illegal market. Then came the war on cocaine.

If the cost of labor increases, someone has to pay for it. Laborers may pay in the form of decreased work opportunities, investors may pay in the form of decreased returns on capital, or consumers may pay in the form of higher prices required by increased costs.

Joan Kennedy Taylor first became involved in the libertarian movement in the early 1960s, when she was a student at the Nathaniel Branden Institute in New York City. As a student of Objectivism, she espoused the political views of Ayn Rand.

It doesn’t seem to matter to Obama that the federal debt already has us $14 trillion in the hole — $140,000 per household. The answer from the Harvard masterminds is to unionize the contractors and subcontractors, to jack up the price of a mile of road to even more inflated levels.

Most people are attracted to real estate because they perceive it to be a high-powered game. They envision building empires the way that most of us have done on the Monopoly board. People like real estate because it is a sexy investment.

I defy anyone to read these stories and still aver that our leaders are cold-hearted folk who relish nothing so much as the specter of people suffering from poverty, and, to boot, are in the pay of rich capitalist exploiters.

What's weird is the world of <i>National Review</i>, where it troubles no one to call for huge spending cuts and slashing government at the domestic level while defending the worst form of global imperialism abroad, complete with reflexive defenses of every violation of human rights and liberty.

They say there's no such thing as bad publicity. But even though the <i>New York</i> author, Christopher Beam, tries to be fair to libertarians, in the end he thinks their worldview is wacko. Here is where Beam goes wrong.

The famous physiocratic tenet that only land is productive must be considered bizarre and absurd. It is certainly a tremendous loss of insight compared to Cantillon, who identified land and labor as original productive factors, and entrepreneurs as the motors of the market economy.

For all the Fed’s imposing grandeur, Ben Bernanke is running our third (albeit longest-running) try at a central bank. This country has lived without a central bank before and, if given the chance, could do so again.