Free Market

Free the Gas Pumps!

by Laurence M. Vance November 1, 2015

Aside from both being coastal states, New Jersey and Oregon have little in common except for one infamous thing. Drivers vacationing or passing through either state for the first time who have to stop to gas up their cars are in for a rude awakening if they try to pump their own gas. They will quickly find out from ...

Free Markets and Human Freedom

by Dean Russell October 1, 2015

There the market is freest, human liberty is highest. If labor is controlled (e.g., slavery), there is neither a free market nor freedom. If capital is controlled (e.g., government ownership), you can’t produce without permission; that’s not freedom. The free-market economy and human freedom are mutually dependent; destroy one, and the other automatically falls…. Governments control people (you and me) ...

The Free Market versus the Bureaucratic State

by Richard M. Ebeling August 26, 2015

The U.S. presidential election of 2016 may still be well over a year away, but those who dream of sitting at the desk in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C. are busy scrambling for campaign supporters, financial contributions, and potential voters in the party primaries that will influence who will run in the general election. As ...

Business Is No Business of the State

by George Leef August 1, 2015

Uncle Sam Can’t Count: A History of Failed Government Investments from Beaver Pelts to Green Energy by Burton W. Folsom Jr. and Anita Folsom (Broadside Books, 2014), 239 pages. The day after the 2010 mid-term elections, the federal government quietly announced the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a “green energy” company that had been touted by Barack Obama as a ...

The Case for Economic Freedom

by Benjamin A. Rogge July 1, 2015

I shall identify my brand of economics as that of economic freedom, and I shall define economic freedom as that set of economic arrangements that would exist in a society in which the government’s only function would be to prevent one man from using force or fraud against another — including within this, of course, the task of national ...

Innovation, Patents, and the Industrial Revolution

by David K. Levine June 1, 2015

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: The Story of Steam, Industry and Invention by William Rosen (University of Chicago Press 2012), 376 pages. This is the story of an important microcosm of the Industrial Revolution: the development of the railroad. Although the story is one of personalities — and the book is engaging and a good read ...

How Technology Can Create Political Change

by Kevin Carson May 1, 2015

Bit by Bit: How P2P Is Freeing the World by Jeffrey Tucker (Liberty.me 2015), Kindle, 130 pages (estimated). Jeffrey Tucker opens with the story of Fereshteh Forough, who set up a chain of clinics in Afghanistan to empower women by teaching them coding, design, and other computer skills that they could market directly on the web. The problem they ...

Defending the Ethical Enterpriser in an Anti-Business Climate

by Richard M. Ebeling April 23, 2015

In spite of the great advances in reducing poverty and increasing the freedom and dignity of hundreds of millions of people around the world, the political and cultural climate virtually everywhere around the world is one of anti-business and anti-capitalism. Yet, it is wherever the forces of free market capitalism have been set freest, along with ...

Americans See Big Corruption in Big Business

by Richard M. Ebeling March 16, 2015

A recently released report on the degree of confidence that Americans have in the country’s leading political and economic institutions showed that few of these institutions are held in high regard by the public. The survey was conducted by NORC, a respected research organization at the University of Chicago. It was found that only 11 percent of those asked expressed ...

Missing the Point about Flourishing

by Kevin Carson March 1, 2015

Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change Movement by Edmund Phelps (Princeton University Press 2013), 392 pages. Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps evaluates economic systems with a view to how they promote human prosperity, or “flourishing”: engagement, meeting challenges, self-expression, and personal growth.... A person’s flourishing comes from the experience of the new: new situations, new problems, ...

The Real Story Remains Untold

by Kevin Carson February 1, 2015

Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution by Emma Griffin (Yale University Press 2013), 320 pages). Emma Griffin calls this a “People’s History of the Industrial Revolution,” and uses documentation of much the same kind as E.P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class — a work she explicitly frames her work as a ...

Nothing to Fear from New Technologies If the Market Is Free

by Kevin Carson January 1, 2015

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (W.W. Norton & Company 2014), 320 pages. The subject of this book is the “second machine age,” in which “computers and other digital advances are doing for mental power — the ability to use our brains to understand ...