Anti-Market Bias Holds Back Developing Countries
Governments of developing countries attempt to thrust their country into prosperity through various statist measures, but their efforts are doomed because they do not understand economics.
Governments of developing countries attempt to thrust their country into prosperity through various statist measures, but their efforts are doomed because they do not understand economics.
Marxism is seen by American and European intellectuals as being a sophisticated and legitimate set of theories that explains social problems in capitalist societies. Yet, the entire edifice of Marxism from “class conflict” to the Labor Theory of Value is nonsense.
Honduras is one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere, but the free city of Próspera, located just of the Honduras coast, is anything but poor. Here, private property and free markets are the norm and Bitcoin is legal tender. Of course, the socialists want it shut down.
The German National Socialists (Nazis) took their inspiration from the USSR and other European socialists.
What fundamentally makes someone a libertarian or a socialist is not the end he finds most important, but the means he believes to be the best way of achieving it.
Britain‘s new Labour Government is doing what leftist governments always do: raising taxes on everyone, but pretending that only the wealthiest citizens will pay more. Middle-class British farmers are quickly finding out that the taxman is coming for them too.
Like Santa, who gives free gifts to our children, people think of the state as providing services “for free.” However, the state cannot provide anything without first confiscating wealth from others—like the Grinch, who first stole all the presents in Whoville.
The idea that the state can provide services and other advantages to its citizens that did not previously exist is in contrast to the arguments of state protection—a fallacy that ought to be dismissed outright.
The original Mont Pelerin Society meeting in 1947 featured Ludwig von Mises, whose warnings about the dangers of socialism and totalitarianism had gone unheeded. In the wreckage of World War II, the truth of his message should have been obvious. It wasn't.
Even though DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) has taken a beating in some state legislatures, it still has a corrupting influence, especially in higher education. As Murray Rothbard pointed out, egalitarians are “at war with nature.”