Free Markets

There's no such thing as a free search. But there are a group of professionals out there driving the price as low as possible, and they certainly earn my admiration.

When looking for a thorough and logically consistent analysis of broad market forces and the role of the Federal Reserve in promoting an unsustainable boom in long-term production, Tom Woods‘s Meltdown remains the best choice.

Within the space of days, we've been provided, courtesy of the Fed itself, with footage that perfectly distills the complete failure of Fed forecasting and planning, and audio that encapsulates splendidly the only thing that the Fed actually accomplishes: the destruction of money.

Insufficiently educated in the history of economic thought, they do not realize that Keynesianism — down to the most technical details, like the concept of the foreign exchange multiplier — is mercantilism or, more precisely, John Lawism pure and simple.

The precept of methodological individualism has shown its usefulness in the explanation of the origin of money.

To make things even worse, the unintended adverse consequences of government "solutions" undermine the premier example of unintended positive consequences in society — the "invisible hand" of market mechanisms that arise from self-ownership and lack of coercion.

Almost invariably, furthermore, the union is not trying to discover the market rate, but to impose various arbitrary "principles" of wage determination, such as "keeping up with the cost of living," a "living wage," the "going rate" for comparable labor in other firms or industries, an annual average "productivity" increase, "fair differentials," and so forth.

Socialism is irreconcilable with freedom. This is the lesson that most of our modern philosophers and littérateurs have yet to learn.

One effect of a minimum wage is to reduce the availability of on-the-job training, since more resources are required simply to hire and retain a workforce.

The market's love of reality is triumphant.