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

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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 two factors made the success of economic liberty unpromising. “Not only the prejudices of the public,” Smith said, “but what is much more unconquerable, the private interests of many individuals, irresistibly oppose it.” By the prejudices of the public, Smith meant the apparent difficulty of many ordinary people to follow the often abstract and complex arguments of the economic theorist that demonstrate the superior workings of the free market over various forms of government intervention and control. And by the private interests of many individuals, Smith had in mind the wide variety of special-interest groups that gain from, and would ...

How to Achieve Omnipotent Government

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Ludwig von Mises explained how government interventionism into economic activity ultimately leads to omnipotent government. It’s because the first intervention inevitably creates problems or crises. Rather than repeal the original intervention, which would constitute an acknowledgement that the intervention had failed, government planners double down by introducing a new intervention to fix the problems or crises of the original ...