Free Markets

Alexander Gray (1882–1968) is my favorite historian of economic thought.

What Hazlitt is saying is this: "If we want to keep our free political system, here are the economic principles to which we must return."

But unlike today, the deflationists and hard-money men had the upper hand. As a result, the depression ended rather quickly (by 1821) when confidence in currency was restored and currency once again was redeemable in specie.

The way to bring the blessings of laissez-faire to the Polish people is first to secure it for ourselves. The enemies of free enterprise and private-property rights here in America are immeasurably benefitted when those who favor the free market are too busy worrying about the "tiger at the gate" to wonder at the absence of freedom right here.

Therefore, whether it is disproportionally hurting African-American teen workers with minimum-wage laws or further endangering already-endangered species, the state is no match for market mechanisms. It remains a slave to unforeseen consequences.

That a functioning market presupposes not only prevention of violence and fraud but the protection of certain rights, such as property, and the enforcement of contracts, is always taken for granted.

The mania for legislation would be, in an important degree, restrained if the government were compelled to pay the expenses of all the suits that grew out of it.

Protectionism and all other forms of war by the state on its people are devastating, and need to be undone.

Cather's most straightforwardly economic book is O Pioneers! (1913).

In a governmentally controlled society, the unrestricted enjoyment of property ownership is not permitted, since government has the power to tax, regulate, and sometimes even confiscate (as in eminent domain) just about anything it pleases. In a laissez-faire society, everything which was valued and rationally claimed would be owned, and this ownership would be total.