Free Markets

Recorded at the Mises Institute Supporters Summit, 1 November 2008; Auburn, Alabama.

"Great Britain's private coins were more popular than official ones, and for good reason…"

This was the first book on economics that just jumped out and grabbed me. I had read a few before, but they were boring. Very boring.

Contrary to what Weisberg claims, the philosophy of freedom has, once again, been proven right.

The principal criticism of anarchism posed by the minarchists here represented is that a free society requires an objective, uniform law code, a demand anarchism cannot satisfy.

Bankruptcy is a normal part of economic life, covered by laws that guarantee stockholders will be compensated as much as possible.

The state punishes those who do good (those who provide services that customers are willing to pay for at a price they are willing to pay) and rewards those who do evil (those who use the coercive power of the state to prevent people from entering the marketplace and earning a living).

And so it happened that Birmingham became "emphatically the town of 'free trade'," where practically no restrictions, commercial or municipal, were known" (Timmins 1866, p. ??), and where the notion of free trade was even to be extended, however briefly, to the nation's coinage.

The idea of private coinage seems so strange today that it is worth examining carefully.

They want to abolish private control of the means of production, market exchange, market prices, and competition. But at the same time they want to organize the socialist utopia in such a way that people could act as if these things were still present. – Ludwig von Mises