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TGIF: Does the Market Exhibit Cooperation?

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The American Heritage Dictionary defines the verb cooperate as “To work or act together toward a common end or purpose” and “To form an association for common, usually economic, benefit.” Note that these definitions seem to require awareness about some joint effort to achieve a common objective. This would seem to leave little room for the social cooperation that libertarians emphasize when describing what Adam Smith called the “system of natural liberty.” Indeed, F.A. Hayek stressed that what goes on in the market is precisely not the striving for common goals and that individual awareness of all the goals aimed at need not be — and in fact never is — present. In volume 2 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1976), Hayek wrote, It is often made a reproach to the Great Society and its market order that it lacks an agreed ranking of ends. This, however, is in fact its great merit which makes individual freedom and all it ...

A Hollow Inauguration

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On January 11, the 11th anniversary of the opening of the “war on terror” prison at Guantánamo, I was in Washington D.C., with human rights groups, lawyers, anti-torture groups (mostly religious), and other concerned persons, calling on Barack Obama to fulfill the promise he made to close the prison when he took office in 2009. It was my fourth Guantánamo anniversary in the nation’s capital, but this year, unlike previous years, we were not allowed to protest in front of the White House, because preparations were being made for Obama’s inauguration. Instead, we spoke in the middle of President’s Park South, with the White House in the distance. It was only after the official event ended that activists with Witness Against Torture, in orange jumpsuits and hoods, dared to make their way to the fence at the back of the White House to tie 166 orange ribbons to the railings — one for each of the men ...

What an Inaugural Shame

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What an inaugural shame. President Obama had a chance to raise the country’s vision to a higher level and to move American into an entirely new direction. He instead made it clear that he intends to keep the nation mired in its statist morass. No libertarian ever expected Obama to embrace the libertarian paradigm of economic liberty. As a dyed-in-the-wool statist, Obama remains committed to the statist economic paradigm of socialism, interventionism, regulation, inflation, taxation, and debt. Like statists everywhere, he’s convinced that all this statism is the key to economic prosperity. His economic models are Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea, which embraced the statist philosophy a long time ago. But where Obama could have moved the nation with a grand vision was in the area of civil liberties and foreign policy. Not having to be concerned about reelection, he could have taken a bold move to restore our nation onto a path of morality, peace, freedom, and harmony. By continuing ...

TGIF: What’s Need Got to Do with It?

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Recent public-policy debates have taken an ominous turn. Proponents of new government impositions increasingly justify their proposals by asserting that the individuals who would be adversely affected should not complain because they do not need whatever the government action would deny them. We've heard this during debates over both higher taxes on upper-income people and gun control. Those favoring higher ...

TGIF: Right-to-Work Laws and the Modern Classical-Liberal Tradition

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It’s not widely known, but an earlier generation of libertarians condemned so-called right-to-work laws as anti-market. For example, Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom, compared right-to-work to anti-discrimination laws. Ayn Rand also opposed right-to-work laws. The Spring 1966 issue of the libertarian student-run journal New Individualist Review carried Professor Hirschel Kasper’s article “What’s Wrong with ...