Free Markets

Interviewed by special guest host, Zoe Russell, on the “Free Markets” internet radio program; 17 July 2010.

Lucidly and unflinchingly he shows it to be the only system consonant with individual freedom and personal autonomy, as well as with modern industrialized society.

"The point of employment is not just jobs: it is productive and economically viable jobs."

If laws or business customs force the employer to make other expenditures besides the wages he pays to the employee, the take-home wages are reduced accordingly. Such accessory expenditures do not affect the gross rate of wages.

Naturally, given Mises's emphasis on the centrality of the division of labor to the maintenance and progress of civilization, he is particularly outspoken regarding the evils of aggressive war, which on top of its physical and human toll brings about the progressive impoverishment of mankind by its radical disruption of a harmonious structure of production that spans the entire globe.

The idea of final utility is to the expert the open sesame, as it were, by which he unlocks the most complicated phenomena of economic life and solves the hardest problems of the science.

What Thoreau was defending here, in 1849, was essentially the same concept the English philosopher Herbert Spencer defended two years later, in his book Social Statics, as "the right to ignore the State."

"In the market, the decision of whether and how much litter to allow is based ultimately on the wishes and desires of the consumers!"

In that way, the possessors of a liberal or pacifist conscience can go about their business assured that they could never be a party to capital punishment; while the rest of us can have the capital punishment we would like to have, free from the interference of liberal busybodies.