Free trade is premised on the idea that human relationships should be voluntary and based on mutual consent. It is grounded on the understanding that the material, cultural, and spiritual improvements in the circumstances and conditions of man are best served when the members of the global community of mankind specialize their activities in a world-encompassing social system of division of labor.
Sometimes government agencies make mistakes and foist a project on us that does more harm than good. In the South, one doesn’t have to go far to see evidence of one of the more pervasive and persistent errors of the Soil Conservation Service—kudzu.
Consumer protection regulation is the consumer’s worst nightmare. In fact, it is not protective at all. It is merely another one of those regulatory rackets that has the appearance of providing necessary security for a collective group in an entirely positive sense while encompassing no negatives. After all, how can anything entitled "protection" have a downside?
No one forms a firm by acquiring resources for the firm at gunpoint. No one becomes an employee of a firm through conscription or forced labor. Firms are formed, and people join firms, as part of a process of voluntary cooperation that we usually refer to as the market.
It occurred me last weekend that children should not grow up without a thorough exposure to the great cartoon from 1962, "The Jetsons." Its celebration of technology and commerce, its retro-style optimism, its hilarious dovetailing of bourgeois normalcy with gizmo-crazed futurism, its complete absence of political correctness (excluding, of course, the atrocious 1990 movie by the same name) – all combine to make this one of the great cartoon achievements of any time.
Through it all, the libertarian theme was the same: liberty for everyone, legal privileges for no one. This is the essence of a free market, but even today it is a message that no faction within the apparatus of the ruling class wants to hear. No matter how divided the factions are among themselves, they form a united front against the libertarian idea, which is the one thing they find most intolerable.
In the weeks following the terror attacks, calls have come from politicians and journalists to "federalize" airport security by making workers who screen passengers and baggage government employees. House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt and others in Congress have declared that "passengers won't feel safe again" unless the government takes this step.
Prior to the Keynesian era, recessions were called panics and had durations of about three months. The shortness in duration reflected the lack of interventionism by extra-market authorities. Today, recessions last much longer, as the bad idea that the state should manage the economy has become legitimized.
There is so much nonsense written about luxury. Yet, Ludwig von Mises has put forth what has to be one of the most cogent, elegant, and sensible theories of luxury ever penned by an economist. It was written more than 70 years ago in his book Liberalism, a timeless exposition of the classical-liberal political philosophy.
