Free Markets

The Gore and Bradley plans to "fix" health care will do nothing of the sort. Neither addresses the key problem of the current system.

From the 1930s through the 1980s, government claimed it could innovate better than private markets. That' s what the boondoggles like TVA, Nasa, and Semitech were all about. Hardly anyone believes that anymore, so the rationale for government regulation of technology has changed. It now concerns such vagaries as fairness and wise resource use.

The Clinton administration wasn't content with blowing up a pharmacy in the Sudan; now it wants to blow up hundreds of them on the web.

Economic development requires participation in the international division of labor, writes Christopher Mayer.  

Thank goodness this bloody century, the era of communism, national socialism, fascism, and central planning-in short, the century of government worship-is coming to an end. May we use the occasion to re-pledge our allegiance to human freedom, which is the basis of prosperity and civilization itself, and to repudiate every ideological force that opposes it.

During the 1980s, just as the free market's reputation was beginning to rebound, the guardians of the national psyche discovered "workaholism." The victim of this disorder was defined as working compulsively, spending far too much time at his occupation, too little with friends or loved ones. He loses the capacity to enjoy what little leisure he allows himself, and eventually cannot even recall the point of his own frenetic activity. We were all advised to ease up, slow down, and smell the roses.

Austrian economists should revel in the story of Ukara, a small, Tanzanian island in Lake Victoria. John Reader, in his astoundingly detailed and fascinating work, Africa: A Biography of the Continent (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), presents among a wealth of other information that should be of genuine interest to economic scholars a little over three pages (beginning at 255) of highly persuasive refutation of the statists' cry for central planning to protect against deadly "sprawl."

Should skydiving and other risky practices be permitted or banned? Tibor Machan argues that only market exchange on private property provides a coherent answer. 

The real meaning of Thanksgiving: Plymouth was a socialist colony and it failed miserably.

Even when the market produces amazing new technology, it can become a basis for criticism. There are two main excuses used today to justify intervention in the technology market. The first argues that manufacturers build a planned obsolescence into their designs. The second argues that a path dependency subsidizes some firms artificially at the expense of others.