Free Markets

International trade is the topic du jour. Mark Thornton shares his recent presentation on a timely and important book featuring many of your favorite authors.

Richard Cobden was a British champion of laissez-faire who served in Parliament. While there, he led to successful campaign to repeal the Corn Laws, which led to British free trade.

Lack of products that precisely match skin tones are often said to be evidence of “white privilege,” yet the market division of labor provides the basis for very specific goods and services.

An enduring myth among American historians is that President Hoover‘s response to the Depression was to let the free market work. This is totally false.

By their nature, free markets promote harmony between people and increase overall standards of living. This view is radically different from the ones promoted by Marxists who believe that only “class interests” matter.

This week in Friday Philosophy, David Gordon reviews The Tariff Superstition: Why Protectionism Always Fails and Who Really Pays the Price by Marcel Kedosa, who levies devastating arguments against protective tariffs, sometimes using the same arguments used by Murray Rothbard.

President Trump claims that tariffs built American wealth. The truth is that tariffs cannot build wealth at all, only destroy it.

Joe Stiglitz is a man with a large ego who believes he holds a special knowledge about economics. In his latest book, however, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, his description of what he thought F.A. Hayek believed is a caricature of Hayek‘s thought.

The religious left today claims that Jesus was a socialist who was against private property and any kind of economic arrangement that smacks of capitalism. An investigation into Jesus‘s teachings and actions overwhelmingly contradicts that notion.

As Mises and other Austrian economists have reminded us, government cannot “invest” profitably because it directs funds toward ventures that were not chosen by voluntary investors.