Free Markets

Trade agreements have thus become obsolete tokens of negotiation in larger geopolitical disputes, protectionist tools for managing and interfering with global trade flows. 

This immense cooperative system is known as a free-market economy. It was not consciously planned by anybody. It evolved.

The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration.

Many advocates claim government intervention is necessary because markets are too unstable. The real instability, however, comes from the immense uncertainty over what government will do next with its vast and arbitrary power.

The fully satisfied individual is purposeless, he does not act, he has no incentive to think, he spends his days in leisurely enjoyment of life. It is certain that living men can never attain such a state of perfection and equilibrium.

The economic policy dominant in the Europe of the 17th and 18th centuries assumed that intervention in economic affairs was a proper function of government.

Unfortunately, some people prefer to attribute the cause of inflation not to an increase in the quantity of money but to the rise in prices.

The theory of class conflict did not begin with Karl Marx. It began with two French libertarians, and James Mill developed a similar theory in the 1820s and 1830s.

One of the characteristic features of this age is the general attack launched by all governments and pressure groups against the rights of creditors.

When an elected official or government bureaucrat interferes with a valid, non-coerced exchange, they may appear to be helping one individual when they are actually harming a foundation of modern society; free exchange of goods and services.