Under laissez-faire capitalism, racial segregation would disappear, even though it would be legally permissible on private property. It would disappear because it is fundamentally incompatible with the requirements of profit-making and because it is irrational.
Profit-seeking employers qua profit-seeking employers are simply unconcerned with race. Their principle is: of two equally good workers, hire the one who is available for less money; of two workers available for the same money, hire the one who is the better worker. Race is simply irrelevant.
In a free market, within the limit of his abilities, each person chooses that job which he believes offers him the best combination of money and nonmonetary considerations. In so doing, he simultaneously acts for his own maximum well-being and for that of the consumers who buy the ultimate products his labor helps to produce.
The oil shortage was “manufactured” by the government, through price controls, not by the oil companies and their perfectly natural and praiseworthy desire to earn profits.
Speculative activity, of course, is not limited to anticipating just future scarcities. Rather, it seeks in general to balance consumption and production over time by accumulating stocks of commodities and regulating their rate of consumption.
A policy of unilateral free trade is analytically equivalent in its effects to a fall in inbound transportation costs while outbound transportation costs remain the same.
If the United States had had a free market in oil when the Arabs imposed their embargo, its oil supplies could not have been seriously jeopardized.
In a free market, there is a tendency toward the establishment of a uniform price for the same good throughout the world.
The uniformity-of-profit principle describes a tendency, never an actually existing state of affairs.
The uniformity-of-profit principle sheds light on the effect of business tax exemptions and their elimination.
Farm subsidies are a way the government achieves artificially high prices. They are an illustration of legal minimum prices—that is, prices below which the government prevents the producers from selling.
The operation of the tendency toward a uniform rate of profit requires that high profits be made by continuously introducing productive innovations in advance of competitors.
How the profit motive acts to make production steadily increase in a free market, and becomes an agent of continuous economic progress.
The real advocates of the consumers—their virtual agents—are businessmen seeking profit, not the leaders of groups trying to restrict the freedom of businessmen to earn profits.
In total opposition to the misguided efforts of the Marxists to contrast production for profit with “production for use,” the fact is that production for profit is production for use.
The uniformity-of-profit principle explains how the activities of all the separate business enterprises are harmoniously coordinated so that capital is not invested excessively in the production of some items while leaving the production of other items unprovided for.
The best way to begin to understand the functioning of the price system, and thus the full nature of the dependence of the division of labor on capitalism, is by understanding the following very simple and fundamental principle. Namely, there is a tendency in a free market toward the establishment of a uniform rate of profit on capital invested in all the different branches of industry.
The development of all the institutional features of capitalism is well illustrated by the economic history of the United States.
Economic progress is the leading manifestation of yet another major institutional feature of capitalism: the harmony of the rational self-interests of all men, in which the success of each promotes the well-being of all.
The existence of freedom under laissez-faire capitalism requires the existence of government.
The greatest era of capitalist development—the last two centuries—has taken place under the ongoing cultural influence of the philosophy of the Enlightenment.
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