Free Markets

The Free Market 21, no. 2 (February 2003)

Proponents of markets often note that there is no such thing as a free lunch.

To read the works of Bastiat is to read economic clarity and logic at its finest. However, numerous examples of the same "broken window fallacies" Bastiat debunked some 150 years ago can be found today in abundant supply. While these neoprotectionist arguments are cloaked in modern language, their core sophisms remain unchanged.

To the extent additional safety comes at a higher cost, it restricts the ability to make provision for other needs and wants, including safety, in other areas of life, writes George Reisman. And this remains true even when the higher costs of safety are initially imposed on business firms rather than directly on consumers. 

Those who claim that government is the source of social order say that in its absence there would be violence, chaos, and a low standard of living. But medieval Iceland illustrates an actual and well-documented historical example of how a stateless legal order can work and it provides insights as to how we might create a more just and efficient society today.

Don't leave the job of criminal investigation to the politicized state.

Charles Lindblom is at it again. In God and Man at Yale, William Buckley, Jr.’s indictment of leftist teaching at Yale University written half a century ago,

Professor Roth differs from most of his fellow economists. He finds the philosophical foundations of the standard model of welfare economics grossly deficient, and his book mounts a devastating criticism of the conventional view.

Professor Desai has given us two books in one: a new interpretation of Marxism, and a history of twentieth-century capitalism. I propose to concentrate, with one exception, on the first of these

A Days Inn on Long Island was fined on December 26, 2001 for having engaged in “price gouging” following the September 11 terrorist attacks. With the nation’s airports closed, stranded passengers created a sudden and unexpected rise in demand for lodging.

What a sight: the legislative and executive branches of government celebrating as they impose new criminal codes against corporate fraud, each politician trying to outdo the other in their moral outrage against business. These are people who created and guard what is perhaps the greatest financial fraud of all time, the $2 trillion federal budget.