Free Markets

Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol revealed why they are not drawn to free-market logic: they find it dull. But economics is no more dull than life itself, writes Lew Rockwell.

Popular contempt for the market is distressing. Few institutions are so universally reviled, and perhaps fewer institutions are so universally misunderstood.

Is the state’s power of eminent domain necessary in a free society? Walter Block and Richard Epstein debate the topic.

Concerns over safety and pollution are merely protectionist tactics to keep out imports from Mexico, writes Gary Galles.

In a private educational setting, with no government meddling, individual schools could set their own policies, writes Robert Murphy.

The trend over the past fifty years has been for a gradual reduction in the number employed in manufacturing, says Jude Blanchette, but both output and productivity have increased.

It may be fashionable to blame the market economy for all of society's ills, writes Art Carden, but this blame is undeserved and many scholars' faith in alternatives to the market is misplaced. No socialist regime has ever held a free election, and no free market has ever produced a death camp. Popular academic opinions to the contrary, the market works. And we can take that to the bank.

The period from the onset of World War I until the demise of the Soviet empire in 1991 has been called the "great parenthesis" in western history, writes JG Hülsmann. The United States offered virtually the only safe haven for capital investments. Among the beneficiaries of this somewhat artificial increase of the capital stock were the American wage earners. Now this epoch is drawing to an end--to the ultimate benefit of all.

If the benefiting consumers from an innovation are largely outside of a given country, writes Robert Murhpy, then it is indeed true that the people in that country might actually be poorer as a result of the innovation. But in that case, no trade policy can change things. On the other hand, if enough of the benefiting consumers are inside a particular country, then the people in that country are helped (on net) by the innovation.