There is no plausible case to be made that for us Americans to improve our comparative advantages, we need the government to protect any of us from foreign competition, other than the protection of individual rights.
MARKETS
Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries. – AYN RAND
Wage and Price Controls Are Not the Answer to Inflation
Reinforcing what economic theory tells us, evidence of the harm of price controls abounds in history, from the infamous 303 A.D. Edict of Emperor Diocletian in Ancient Rome to America’s 1970s gasoline price controls and, perhaps most infamously, New York City’s disastrous eight-decade-long experiment with rent control.
Unfair Labor Practices? Why Don’t You Go Somewhere Else?
Unionized workers effectively form a cartel that would be illegal under antitrust laws as an obvious “restraint of trade” if unions had not been specifically exempted from the rules.
State Investing, Not ESG, Is the Political Problem
The problem isn’t so much that a company takes ideological considerations into account in its business practices so much as that governments — such as state-run pension funds — are imposing ideological agendas on businesses via this financial control.
Prices and Costs of Production in a Free-Market
In a free market, the prices of products tend to be governed by their costs of production.
The False Face of SBF, FTX, and ESG
FTX and its subsidiaries, guided by SBF, had as much to do with “building a flourishing future” as ESG does with “creating a livable planet.”
Proud to be a Real Estate Investor
Investors should be proud of what they do.
Modern-day Luddites
Modern-day Luddites oppose a different type of progress—gentrification.
Preservation vs. Affordable Housing
Historic preservation is a pretense for dictating how others may or may not use their property.
Money Creation, Then And Now
One good way to understand the current monetary system is to gain a basic understanding of banking history.
U.S. Government’s War on Savings
The U.S. government has long been waging war on savings, making it the cause of, rather than the solution to, low savings rates.
Wage Rates Under Capitalism
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.
Privatize Disaster Relief
The better approach to disasters relies on private initiative, markets, and insurance instead of ineffective government bureaucracies and bloated budgets. Every aspect of disaster relief can be privatized, or rather re-privatized, and should be, if policymakers want to save lives and money.
Foreign Investment: Protectionism vs. Industrialization (5 of 5)
The prerequisite for more economic equality in the world is industrialization. And this is possible only through increased capital investment, increased capital accumulation. You may be astonished that I have not mentioned a measure which is considered a prime method...
Commodity Speculation in a Free-Market
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.
Incentivizing Bad Behavior: HUD, Freddie Mac, and Fannie Mae
To this day, private companies are castigated for “predatory lending.” Yet, it was government policy that incentivized loans to those who couldn’t afford to repay them.
Defending Grocery Stores’ “Excess” Profits
We should celebrate, not resent, the grocers’ profits.
Foreign Investment: The Problem of Domestic Capital Accumulation (4 of 5)
What is lacking in order to make the developing countries as prosperous as the United States is only one thing: capital-and, of course, the freedom to employ it under the discipline of the market and not the discipline of the government.
California Government’s Myopic Antitrust Action Against Amazon
Amazon has made its platform so attractive to third-party merchants that large numbers of them willingly pay a premium in order to continue to use Amazon’s platform.
Racism and Housing
Widespread racism can only occur when government mandates it.
Arab Oil Embargo Would Not Be a Threat to a Free Market Economy
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.
Foreign Investment: Expropriation of Foreign Capital (3 of 5)
Foreign investment is made in the expectation that it will not be expropriated. Nobody would invest anything if he knew in advance that somebody would expropriate his investments. At the time when these foreign investments were made in the nineteenth century, and at...
The Landlord Shrugged
Government officials love to loudly proclaim the great benefits that tenants will enjoy by restricting and controlling landlords. The folly of their schemes will become clear when they discover that the landlord shrugged.
The “Right to Return”
Like all forms of subsidies, the “right to return” takes from some—taxpayers—to provide benefits to others—low-income households.
Abusing Statistics and Evicting “People of Color”
The report on eviction filings looks at groups, not individuals. Consequently, it fails to identify the context for the individuals who were evicted.
Global Prices in a Free Market
In a free market, there is a tendency toward the establishment of a uniform price for the same good throughout the world.
The Impossibility of Socialism
Socialism as a means for improving the condition of man is impossible.
Foreign Investment: A Great Historical Event of the 19th Century (2 of 5)
Without capital investment, it would have been necessary for nations less developed than Great Britain to start with the methods and technology the British had started with at the beginning of the 18th century, and slowly try to imitate what the British had done.
Money Creation: Who Cares?
Commercial banks do not lend out other peoples’ money. On the contrary, banks create new money every time they make a loan.
Unleash the Swarm in Housing Production
If we unleash the swarm, if we restore freedom to property owners, we will see an immense increase in housing production. Property owners could convert single-family homes into duplexes, build a cottage or “granny flat” in the back yard, or do any number of other things to increase the supply of housing.
This Labor Day, Don’t Praise Labor Unions
This Labor Day, the real threat to election integrity isn’t at your polling place–it’s at your workplace.
Final Thoughts on the Uniformity of Profit Principle
The uniformity-of-profit principle describes a tendency, never an actually existing state of affairs.
Subscribe for free.
Latest pro-Capitalism goodness sent weekly to your email box.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.