Mercantilism

Economic Ideas: Jean-Baptiste Say and the “Law of Markets”

by Richard M. Ebeling June 19, 2017

Whatever economic freedom we enjoy in the world today is due, to a great extent, to the ideas and efforts of the classical liberals and economists of the first half of the nineteenth century. Inspired by the eighteenth-century writings of the French Physiocrats and Scottish Moral Philosophers (for example, David Hume and Adam Smith), they forcefully and insightfully demonstrated ...

Economic Ideas: Frédéric Bastiat on the Law of Liberty and Free Markets

by Richard M. Ebeling May 30, 2017

The defense of economic liberty has never been an easy task. Adam Smith expressed his own despair at this problem in The Wealth of Nations. After presenting his powerful criticisms of mercantilism—the eighteenth-century system of government regulation and planning—he despondently suggested that free trade in Great Britain was as unlikely as the establishment of a utopia. He said that ...

Economic Ideas: Adam Smith on Free Trade, Crony Capitalism, and the Benefits from Commercial Society

by Richard M. Ebeling December 19, 2016

Adam Smith’s central contribution to economic understanding was surely his demonstration that under an institutional arrangement of individual liberty, property rights, and voluntary exchange the self-interested conduct of market participants could be shown to be consistent with a general betterment of the human condition. The emergence of a social system of division of labor makes men interdependent for the necessities, ...

Economics Ideas: David Hume on Self-Coordinating and Correcting Market Processes

by Richard M. Ebeling December 5, 2016

David Hume was one of the most prominent of the Scottish Moral Philosophers. He is particularly famous as a philosophical skeptic, who, in his book, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), questioned whether man’s reason and reasoning ability could successfully apprehend reality with any complete degree of certainty. He also argued that reason followed men’s “passions,” rather than reason ...

Economic Ideas: Inflation, Price Controls and Collectivism During the French Revolution

by Richard M. Ebeling November 7, 2016

Governments have an insatiable appetite for the wealth of their subjects. When governments find it impossible to continue raising taxes or borrowing funds, they have invariably turned to printing paper money to finance their growing expenditures. The resulting inflations have often undermined the social fabric, ruined the economy, and sometimes brought revolution and tyranny in their wake. The political economy ...

Economic Ideas: The French Physiocrats and the Case for Laissez-faire.

by Richard M. Ebeling October 31, 2016

In the middle decades of the eighteenth century two schools of thought emerged, one in France and the other in Great Britain that were critical of Mercantilism, the government system of economic planning and regulation in the 1700s. In Great Britain, the primary thinkers were members of what has become known as the Scottish Moral Philosophers. In France the ...

Economic Ideas: Mercantilism as Monarchy’s Planned Economy

by Richard M. Ebeling October 24, 2016

The Feudal System had resulted in the disintegration of the unity that much of Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe had known under the Roman Empire. Following the fall of Rome, Europe was divided into local and regional political and economic entities, each politically functioning and economically surviving in high degrees of isolation from each other. However, beginning in the fifteenth ...

Free Trade Is Fair Trade

by Laurence M. Vance June 1, 2016

As relayed by Harvard economics professor and chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, N. Gregory Mankiw, “The Princeton economist Alan Blinder once proposed Murphy’s Law of economic policy: ‘Economists have the least influence on policy where they know the most and are most agreed; they have the most influence on policy where they know the least ...

Free Market Capitalism vs. Crony Capitalism

by Richard M. Ebeling July 14, 2014

In the minds of many people around the world, including in the United States, the term “capitalism” carries the idea of unfairness, exploitation, undeserved privilege and power, and immoral profit making. What is often difficult to get people to understand is that this misplaced conception of “capitalism” has nothing to do with real free markets and economic liberty, and ...

Collapsing the Tent on the Mercantilist Revival

by Alexander William Salter June 1, 2013

Harvard professor Dani Rodrik’s recent mercantilist apology attempts to illustrate the unappreciated benefits of a much-maligned political-economic system: mercantilism. “Today, mercantilism is typically dismissed as an archaic and blatantly erroneous set of ideas about economic policy,” Rodrik acknowledges. Thus his essay provides a defense of this system, which he believes has much to offer ...

The New Mercantilism

by Sheldon Richman March 17, 2006

When the old-fashioned colonial powers like Great Britain ruled the waves, and mercantilism was the world’s organizing principle, the developed nations got cheap raw materials from the undeveloped nations and in turn sold them expensive finished goods. We may think that mercantilism and colonialism have been left behind, but as the French say, the more things change, the ...

West Africa and Colonialism, Part 1

by Wendy McElroy October 1, 2004

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 Until recently, Western scholarship ignored West Africa. The blind spot reflects Europes historical view of Africa as a continent to be exploited, not examined. To Europe, Africa was a market for products and a source of raw goods. In short, it was an object of mercantilism the economic system ...