Dr. Richard M. Ebeling is the recently appointed BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel. He was formerly professor of Economics at Northwood University, president of The Foundation for Economic Education (2003–2008), was the Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics at Hillsdale College (1988–2003) in Hillsdale, Michigan, and served as vice president of academic affairs for The Future of Freedom Foundation (1989–2003).
If there is one common enemy that all opponents of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government seemingly can agree upon it is the “evil” of neo-liberalism. Everything that is hated in an open, competitive market society is summed into that word and...
The idea that there was a time in American history when many more matters of daily life were considered the domain of personal decision-making and voluntary collaborative community effort has mostly been erased from people’s memory. We live in a time when an...
The end goal of our planning paternalists is the command economy, the government-directed market, with all businesses required to follow the planner’s investment and employment directives and, presumably, be subject to some type of punishment if the imposed targets...
America! The word has meant hope, opportunity and freedom for tens of millions of people over the last two and half centuries. For a good part of those 250 years, the words on the Stature of Liberty in New York harbor have rang true: “Give me your tired, your...
Those who have seen the 1982 Steven Spielberg movie Poltergeist may remember the scene when the little girl touches the snowy screen of her family’s television and says, “They’re here,” meaning the evil ghostly forces bringing death and destruction. Well, they are...
Another partial federal government “shutdown” began on December 22, 2018. The impression from the media and other commentaries easily suggested that the political and economic sky was about to fall. Various government departments were closed and some government...
I recently have been reading a number of books written by European travellers who visited the United States, particularly, in the early and mid-decades of the 19th century.
Central banking is a form of central planning. The Federal Reserve has a legal monopoly over the monetary system of the United States.
House Resolution 109 “Recognizing the Duty of the Federal Government to Create a Green New Deal,” has a long list of sponsoring congresspersons who seem to be not much different from that child in the toy store.
The famous New York Yankees baseball player and manager Yogi Berra is credited with the saying “It’s déjà vu all over again.” He is also credited with claiming, “I really didn’t say everything I said.” Never were both of these truer than in our era of reborn...
Why is it so difficult to win the case for freedom in modern American society? A variety of possible answers come to mind. The collectivists are more effective in appealing to people’s emotions. The interventionist-welfare-statist argument is easier to make than it is...
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...
Government censorship will only reduce the ability to understand the causes of people guided by anti-capitalist ideas.
Imagine that in 1946 the general-secretary of the United Nations had submitted a resolution to the General Assembly stating that Nazi crimes were so horrendous and despicable that the countries of the world needed to impose a blanket censorship on any public reference...
The best solution would be if the British authorities followed a policy of laissez-faire.
Freedom and the free society are once again under direct attack by those who espouse far-greater degrees of government control over people’s lives. Wrapping themselves in the cloak of progressivism, “social justice,” and liberation from oppression and discrimination,...
Another election cycle has begun, even though it is less than a half a year since the November 2018 congressional elections. Donald Trump seems unlikely to face a serious challenger for his re-nomination as the Republican candidate for president (unless explosive...
What we live under is a heavily regulated, managed and controlled interventionist-welfare state that operates not by free-market competition but political cronyism.
The philosophy of individualism is the foundation of a free society; it is the basis of a community of men that does not require or demand the sacrifice or enslavement of some for the one-sided benefits of others.
At the end of the day, the balance of payments always balances.
In his 1910 textbook, Elementary Principles of Economics, world-renowned Yale Professor Irving Fisher devoted part of a chapter to “Population in Relation to Wealth.” Fisher warned of the problem of “race suicide” caused by the fact that the most industrious and...
Indeed, democracy and freedom are frequently heralded as being synonyms. An important question, however, is, What do these concepts mean, and are they in fact synonymous?
Introduce government intervention into the market system, and monopoly becomes a social harm and an economic problem.
The fundamental flaw in Professor DeLong’s view, as in John Maynard Keynes’ 1936 book is the idea that there exists a macro-economy the two sides of which are composed of aggregate demand and aggregate supply.
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