Economics

The Libertarian Angle: FA Hayek and Spontaneous Order

by Future of Freedom Foundation March 28, 2017

FFF president Jacob Hornberger and Richard Ebeling discuss how spontaneous order organizes society in an efficient way while at the same time preserving liberty. Go to the podcast.

The Libertarian Angle: Minimum Wage and Free Trade

by Future of Freedom Foundation February 21, 2017

FFF president Jacob Hornberger and Richard Ebeling, along with special guest Donald J. Boudreaux, discuss the economics of the minimum wage and free trade. Go to the podcast.

Economic Ideas: Karl Marx’s Misconceptions about Man and Markets

by Richard M. Ebeling February 20, 2017

Though it may seem strange, Karl Marx was not always a communist. As late as 1842, when Marx was in his mid-20s, he actually said he opposed any attempt to establish a communist system. In October 1842, he became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung , and wrote in an editorial: The Rheinische Zeitung . . . does not ...

Economic Ideas: Karl Marx, the Man Behind the Communist Revolution

by Richard M. Ebeling February 13, 2017

When Karl Marx died in March 1883, only about a dozen people attended his funeral at a cemetery in London, England, including family members. Yet, for more than a century after his death – and even until today – there have been few thinkers whose ideas have been as influential on various aspects of modern world history. Indeed, as ...

The Economic Nationalism of Donald Trump

by Richard M. Ebeling January 30, 2017

Donald Trump has hardly taken his hand off the Bible upon which he took the presidential oath to preserve, protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, and he has already radically and rapidly begun to transform the direction of the American government. Taking up (at least metaphorically) Barack Obama’s pen, he has signed a series of executive orders. Several of ...

Economic Ideas: David Ricardo on Wealth, Inflation, and Freedom

by Richard M. Ebeling January 16, 2017

David Ricardo (1772-1823) was one of the most influential economic theorists of the first half of the nineteenth century. Born in London, England, his father’s family were orthodox Jews originally from Portugal who had moved to England from Holland. His father was a highly successful stockbroker. David Ricardo learned the family business, and most likely would have ...

Economic Ideas: Thomas Malthus on Population, Passions, Property and Politics

by Richard M. Ebeling January 9, 2017

Those of us who have been fortunate enough to have been born in what is often still referred to as the Western World (Europe and North America) rarely appreciate the historical uniqueness of our material and related cultural well being compared not only to many still around the globe today, but relative to those who lived in that Western ...

Freedom in Transactions

by Fredric Bastiat January 1, 2017

On entering Paris, which I had come to visit, I said to myself — here are a million human beings who would all die in a short time if provisions of every kind ceased to flow towards this great metropolis. Imagination is baffled when it tries to appreciate the vast multiplicity of commodities that must enter tomorrow through the ...

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: Adam Ferguson and Society as a Spontaneous Order

by Richard M. Ebeling November 28, 2016

One of the most cherished misunderstandings, if not delusions, of the social engineer – the individual who would presume to attempt to remake society through conscious and planned design – is the confident belief that he (and those like him) can ever know enough to successfully remold mankind and human institutions. An appreciation of how limited is our individual knowledge ...

Economic Ideas: Francis Hutcheson and a System of Natural Liberty

by Richard M. Ebeling November 21, 2016

Scotland would seem a strange place for the emergence of center of intellectual development that would influence the stream of ideas throughout the world. Scotland had been unified with England near the beginning of the eighteenth century. It was considered a “backwater” of European civilization. But perhaps because of the strong nationalist sentiments and resentments that still lingered among many ...