Mises Wire

The Left has often claimed that privatization is a neoliberal scam. But actual experience suggests privatization schemes have improved access to goods and services while raising productivity and real incomes. 

Though he was generally a Ricardian, John Stuart Mill thought that the main obstacle to socialism is that people might not yet be civilized enough to put it into practice. 

The idea of ordinary people enjoying luxuries and "unnecessary" items has long troubled intellectuals and aristocrats. But thanks to capitalism, ordinary people can now enjoy the basic pleasures the ruling classes have long seized for their own. 

Murray Rothbard wrote, “The rate of interest is the price of ‘time.’” It’s safe to say the world’s central banks have manipulated and mispriced what time is worth.

Ideally, political elites would like nothing more than state-sponsored ethnic conflict. Having multiple groups pitted against each other in petty political squabbles makes effective opposition against the managerial class virtually impossible. 

“The General Theory was published in 1936 and Hayek decided not to respond directly. In making this decision, Hayek committed what many defenders of the free market system consider to be one of the major tactical errors of this century.” 

Deficits still matter, largely because they require monetary policies that lead to bubbles, inequality, and the slow Japanization of the US economy. 

There are ominous signs on the horizon that governments want to move toward mandating "socially responsible investing" for pensions and fund managers. This is a terrible idea, to say the least. 

Yes, capitalism is more efficient than socialism, but to build a compelling argument for free market capitalism, defenders of liberty must also articulate that it is a superior moral system.

What does "the consent of the governed" mean? In 2020, 53 percent of US residents either voted for someone other than Trump or Biden, or didn’t vote at all. It also means about 75 percent of the population did not vote for Biden.