Free Markets

Still, the book is a beginning — an attempt to communicate free-market solutions to specific problems, to classes of people usually inimical to this approach.

Briefly, the importance of the Hayek theory of the business cycle is that it puts the blame for the boom-bust cycle squarely on the shoulders of the government and its controlled banking system, and, for the first time since the classical economists of the 19th century, completely absolves the free-enterprise economy from the blame.

All that stands between the present awful reality and 0% unemployment is a class of social managers unwilling to admit error.

Academic freedom, as such, is fraud and theft, because it denies individuals the right of free and voluntary contracts.

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.