Entrepreneurs are the reason consumers have come to expect new gains and innovations in products and services every year. Without entrepreneurs, we'd still be using rotary phones.
Clearly marked prices on private-sector cash-payment surgeries are a great thing. In fact, the competition of for-profit surgery centers drives down prices at more "traditional" (i.e., highly bureaucratized) hospitals.
Singapore left both the British Empire and Malaysia before finally becoming an independent city. It then proceeded to become one of history's most impressive economic success stories.
Trade agreements have thus become obsolete tokens of negotiation in larger geopolitical disputes, protectionist tools for managing and interfering with global trade flows.
Many advocates claim government intervention is necessary because markets are too unstable. The real instability, however, comes from the immense uncertainty over what government will do next with its vast and arbitrary power.
What exchanges take place, and which do not, is affected by how markets are regulated. Black markets and regulated markets have different outcomes than free markets.
Rothbard’s work on welfare economics probably ranks among his least-known achievements, but it is truly a tour de force and another tribute to his great originality and talent as an economist.
