Free Market

TGIF: Intellectual Property Fosters Corporate Concentration

by Sheldon Richman January 10, 2014

The modern libertarian case against so-called intellectual property (IP) has been building steadily since the late 1980s, when I first encountered it. Since then, an impressive volume of work has been produced from many perspectives: economics, political economy, sociology, moral and political philosophy, history, and no doubt more. It is indeed a case to be reckoned with. ...

Mandela Wasn’t Radical Enough

by Sheldon Richman December 11, 2013

I suppose we will forever be subjected to incomplete accounts of the life of Nelson Mandela and the evil he struggled against. Both the Right and the Left (as conventionally defined in America) are too busy pushing agendas to provide the full story. On the establishment Right (with some honorable exceptions) apartheid was deemed unimportant in the context of the ...

A Flood of Government Intervention

by Laurence M. Vance November 4, 2013

Some Americans are outraged at the federal government for reasons other than the recent government shutdown. No, they are not outraged because the National Science Foundation is funding the development of card games, videos and other educational programs “to engage adult learners and inform public understanding and response to climate change” through the $5.7 million Polar Learning and ...

Gabriel Kolko Revisited, Part 2: Kolko Abroad

by Joseph R. Stromberg October 1, 2013

Part 1 | Part 2 Gabriel Kolko’s historical writing hinges on the interrelations of economic, political, and ideological power in American history. His later work increasingly focused on those phenomena in relation to war, peace, and empire. As his project went forward, Kolko increasingly departed from that Marxist framework in which state power becomes so utterly subordinate ...

Gabriel Kolko Revisited, Part 1: Kolko at Home

by Joseph R. Stromberg September 1, 2013

Part 1 | Part 2 An earlier generation of libertarians was interested in Gabriel Kolko, a historian of the Left. Who was he? Born in 1932 in Paterson, NJ, historian Gabriel Kolko studied at Kent State, the University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University (PhD: 1962). From 1970 until his retirement he taught history at York University in Toronto, ...

Book Review: The Moral Case for a Free Economy

by Laurence M. Vance August 1, 2013

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy by Robert Sirico (Regnery Publishing, 2012), 213 pages. Critics of the free market assert that it fails the underprivileged, leads to income inequality, exploits the poor, and is at times downright cruel. They charge its defenders with being motivated by greed, selfishness, and materialism, and making a god out ...

The Market Is a Beautiful Thing

by Sheldon Richman July 1, 2013

Market advocates tend to respect the intellect of their fellow human beings. You can tell by their reliance on philosophical, moral, economic, and historical arguments when trying to persuade others. But what if most people’s aversion to the market isn’t founded on philosophy, morality, economics, or history? What if their objection is aesthetic? More and more I’ve come to think ...

Bangladeshi Workers Need Freed Markets

by Sheldon Richman May 22, 2013

Since November, more than a thousand Bangladeshi garment workers have perished in two tragic factory calamities: a fire in Tazreen and a building collapse in Savar, outside the capital, Dhaka. Bangladesh is a major exporter of apparel to the West and “is set to become the world’s largest apparel exporter over the next few years,” the Economist reports. ...

Food Safety: A Market Solution

by Paul Schwennesen May 1, 2013

The FDA is trumpeting, with unseemly giddiness, sweeping implementation of new rules within the now thoroughly moldered food-safety bill, passed two long years ago. Like any dish served past its prime, this one smells a bit off. As a producer in the ascendant food renaissance (defined by a sudden respect for all things small and local) I’ve noticed a curious ...

Book Review: What Reality Teaches Us

by Laurence M. Vance May 1, 2013

No, They Can’t: Why Government Fails — But Individuals Succeed by John Stossel (New York: Threshold Editions, 2012), 324 pages. John Stossel is the well-known host of Stossel on Fox Business. A graduate of Princeton, he has won an incredible 19 Emmy awards, is a five-time honoree for excellence in consumer reporting, and is a New York Times bestselling ...

TGIF: The Myth of Market Failure

by Sheldon Richman April 5, 2013

In the language of economics, a market failure is, as David Friedman writes, “a situation where each individual correctly chooses the action that best accomplishes his objectives, yet the result is worse, in terms of those same objectives, than if everyone had done something else.” As a rule, the pursuit of individual good in the market ...

Market Manipulations

by Tim Kelly March 25, 2013

With all the government meddling in the economy, it is virtually impossible to sort out free-market functions from political manipulations. It is also impossible to predict the economy’s future performance with any degree of accuracy. There are simply too many variables, and with most economic data being manipulated to serve political agendas, the chances of getting an accurate picture ...