Free Markets

Under decentralized government, close elections might still make for enjoyable standoffs, but the stakes would not be nearly so high.

Economic science per se cannot establish ethical statements. The problem of 'welfare economics' has always been to find some way to circumvent this restriction on economics….The free market is the name for the array of all the voluntary exchanges that take place in the world.

It's the code that Isabel Paterson, the great twentieth-century libertarian, had in mind when she said that modern ideas of freedom are dependent on "the axiom of liberty" embedded in Christian teaching.

If I were to give a tour of the United States to visitors from a socialist country, who are used to experiencing chronic shortages of almost everything, Wal-Mart would be one of the first places I would take them. It is a perfect symbol of one of the most remarkable things that we have — an enormous variety of high quality, low cost products that are available to virtually everyone throughout the United States.

Few economists have the courage to point to labor legislation and regulation as the very cause of mass unemployment.

They seem blissfully unaware that once the power to define words is given to the state, it merely depends on who runs the state in order for the definition to be changed, and they seem too ready to tinker with the US Constitution in order to manage something that should have absolutely nothing to do with the state.

These are but a few highlights from the outstanding presentations made at the first meeting of the Property and Freedom Society; which stands for an uncompromising intellectual radicalism. If only Murray, that joyous, uncompromising intellectual radical could have been there with us.

I wanted to show students that economics stems from ordinary human behavior in the real world we face every day. By showing them that trade, money, savings, competition, and prices all have distinctly human origins and purposes, I hoped to help them make better sense out of the "economics" they will some day be exposed to.

Mongolians would be better off building on the new wealth created by a potential copper mine, rather than discouraging risk-takers from finding and developing new mines.

Recorded at the Mises Circle in Costa Mesa, California, on 6 May 2006.