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Why Not Dismantle the New Deal?

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Every so often, progressives and the mainstream press exclaim with horror that Republicans are intent on dismantling the New Deal, the socialist-interventionist economic system that the Franklin Roosevelt administration brought into existence in the 1930s and that has been with us ever since. The concerns are groundless. Republicans and conservatives are as wedded to FDR’s New Deal, especially Social Security and Medicare, as Democrats and leftists are. The only ones who really want to dismantle the New Deal are we libertarians. The obvious question arises: Why shouldn’t the New Deal, including its crown jewel, Social Security, be dismantled, especially since the entire program was born in illegitimacy? The United States was founded on the principles of economic liberty and free markets. What that meant was that most people were free to pursue their economic interests without governmental interference. People could enter into occupations and trades without licenses or permits. They could enter into mutually beneficial economic trades with others, including labor contracts ...

Paul Leroy-Beaulieu: A Warning Voice About the Socialist Tragedy to Come

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The Russian Revolution of November 1917, now being marked by its centenary, ushered in a hundred years of political tyranny and terror, economic suffering, exploitation and corruption, along with unimaginable mass murder, among the tens of millions of people who came under the control and command of Marxist inspired socialist regimes around the world.  But before this tragic episode occurred in human history, indeed, decades before Vladimir Lenin and his cohort of communist revolutionaries seized power in Russia, there were clear and insightful critics of socialism who explained much of what was to be in store in any attempt to implement and impose a collectivist utopia on humanity. One of the leading such anti-socialist voices in the second half of the nineteenth century was the French classical liberal and free market economist, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (1843-1916). In 1870, Leroy-Beaulieu won several awards for his book on Colonialism and Modern Man. While not openly opposing the French government’s colonial occupation of countries ...

The Racism and S***Hole Circus Misses the Point

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Amidst all the furor over whether Donald Trump is a racist and whether he did in fact describe Haiti and African countries as “s***holes,” the real point is one that hardly anyone wants to face, including Trump’s critics who continue to support immigration controls on Haiti and Africa to ensure that not too many of their citizens come to the United States. The real point is this: The ongoing, decades-long U.S. immigration crisis, chaos, and controversy are rooted in immigration controls. As long as immigration controls remain in place, so will the crisis, chaos, and controversy. There is no conceivable immigration plan that will ever work. Not one. Bring together all the immigration experts into one room. Give them access to the best computers that have ever been built. They will still not be able to come up with a “comprehensive immigration reform plan” that will work. Whatever plan they recommend and adopt will inevitably result in crisis, chaos, and ...

Capitalism and How Expectations Coordinate Markets

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Open, competitive markets have a resilient capacity to successfully coordinate the actions of, now, billions of people around the world. With an amazing adaptability to changing circumstances, the actions and reactions of multitudes of suppliers and demanders are brought into balance with each other. Yet, none of this requires government planning, regulation or directing control. But how does this ...

America’s Great Depression and Austrian Business Cycle Theory

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When Murray Rothbard’s America’s Great Depression first appeared in print in 1963, the economics profession was still completely dominated by the Keynesian Revolution that began in the 1930s. Rothbard, instead, employed the “Austrian” approach to money and the business cycle to explain the causes for the Great Depression, and to analyze the misguided and counterproductive policies that were followed ...

The Problem with Conservatism

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Nikolai G. Wenzel has a problem with conservatism. A libertarian, Wenzel is a Research Fellow at the University of Paris Law School’s Center for Law & Economics and the coauthor (with conservative Nathan W. Schlueter) of Selfish Libertarians and Socialist Conservatives? The Foundations of the Libertarian-Conservative Debate (Stanford Economic and Finance, 2017). This book is the only “debate book” between ...

Capitalism and the Misunderstanding of Monopoly

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Numerous misunderstanding and mythologies surround the meaning of capitalism and competition, but few match the confusions over the meaning and relevance of “monopoly” in the workings of the market economy. When looked at dispassionately, factually, and historically, monopoly has almost always represented a problem in society only when created, protected or imposed by government intervention. Critics of capitalism have proposed ...