Capitalism has brought about growing prosperity for the human condition while cultivating a more polite society.
Richard M. Ebeling
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).
Macro Aggregates Hide the Real Market Processes at Work
Government planners fail to “manage” market economies as the indicators they use are themselves false signals hiding from view the reality of the complex market system.
Free Markets vs. Democratic Socialism
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?
Interest Rates Need to Tell the Truth
In the middle of July 2018, President Donald Trump said in an interview that he was “not happy” with the Federal Reserve nudging up interest rates and threatening economic growth in the United States. At the recent Jackson Hole, Wyoming, meeting of global central bank...
The Best Response to Foreign Tariffs? Lower Your Own
The fact is, while the U.S. and the major European countries have emphasized the idea and benefits from free trade, all of these governments impose various types of tariff and other barriers to shelter selected sectors of their respective economies.
The Myth that Central Banks Assure Economic Stability
What is the fundamental issue is: monetary central planning – with its embarrassingly awful one hundred year track record with paper monies – or getting government’s direct or indirect hand off the handle of the monetary printing press.
Free Market Capitalism is the Humanistic Solution to the World’s Political and Economic Problems
What our world needs today is to transcend the collectivisms of the present, whether under more extreme authoritarian regimes or the seemingly milder spiders’ web of controls and commands of the interventionist-welfare state under existing democratic systems of govern…
Tariff Wars (and the Fallacy of the Balance of Trade)
The world may be on the brink of a series of trade wars between the United States and both the European Union and China. All the parties say they don’t want this — though President has asserted that trade wars are not a problem and easy to win. That remains to be...
Still Haunting The World: Karl Marx and Marxism 200 Years Later
A specter continues to haunt the world, the specter of Karl Marx. Two hundred years ago, on May 5, 1818, the father of twentieth century totalitarian communism, the guidebook writer of revolutionary mass-murdering dictatorship, and the inspirer of disastrous socialist c…
A Not-So Great Society: The Legacy of Lyndon Johnson
The “untouchable” entitlement programs at the heart of the current debt crisis are the outgrowths of the redistributive programs introduced by or greatly expanded during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.
The Unintended Consequences of The Minimum Wage
But behind all of these negative and usually unintended consequences arising from the imposing of a government-enforced hourly minimum wage remains the fundamental ethical issue: who shall have the right to decide under what terms and conditions people enter into gainfu…
Trump’s Protectionist Tariffs Threaten a Trade War
The illogical trade policies of President Trump not only threaten to make Americans poorer, but could start a global trade war that could lead to decreasing standards of living for hundreds of millions of people around the globe.
Capitalism and “Public Goods” Like National Defense
The competitive market economy is a powerful institutional mechanism for bringing human ingenuity, energy and creativity to bear to improve both the material and cultural circumstances of multitudes of people around the world. Wherever relatively free market...
The Debt Ceiling Hysteria and Profligate Government
The Crisis is Not Debt Default, But Too Much Government Spending
A Government Shutdown is Not Really a Shutdown
Would it really matter if most, or even all, of federal employees who are sent home stayed home permanently?
Yemen: The Land That Freedom Forgot
How life is lived when a people have not been touched by the ideas of the Enlightenment and a philosophy of freedom.
The Presidential Legacies of Donald Trump and Barrack Obama
Barack Obama’s paternalism or Donald Trump’s nationalism?
A Pro-Capitalist Political Agenda
What a real advocate of Capitalism might say if he was offering himself for political office.
Capitalism and Free-Market Competition
According to the critics of capitalism, competition is a cruel process feeding unnecessary wants, that evolves into anti-competitive monopolies acting contrary to the “public interest.”
Capitalism and Monopolies
Harmful monopolies are always created by government.
A “Right Side” to History? The Failure of Marx’s Predictions About Capitalism, Part 2
Those who speak about being on the “right side of history” have, knowingly or not, adopted a central element in Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism
A “Right Side” to History? The Failure of Marx’s Predictions About Capitalism, Part 1
One of the most common phrases to be heard from those on “the left” is the assertion that someone or some public policy is or is not on “the right side of history.”
What Capitalism Is and What Capitalism Is Not (Part 2 of 2)
The free enterprise, or capitalist, system has done more to improve the material condition of humanity than any other economic arrangement of human cooperation in all of recorded history.
What Capitalism Is and What Capitalism Is Not (Part 1 of 2)
“Capitalism is an economic system based on the principle of every individual’s right to his own life, his own liberty and his own honestly acquired property. This private property includes his own mind and body, and the physical products that his mental and physical e…
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