Endorsing individuals’ freedom to trade with foreigners is simply of a piece with the more general endorsement of individuals’ freedom to trade with whomever they please, whether fellow citizens or not. The protectionist position, in contrast, invariably relies upon arbitrary distinctions that ensnare protectionists in intellectual and ethical inconsistencies.
Ten years ago, Venezuela set out on a path to economic ruin and grave shortages of basic consumer goods, because of price controls on groceries and other products. Is the US really going to travel on the same road?
Free nations as such don’t gain or lose from trade; only individual traders do.
The fundamental principle that we need to recognize to help all workers flourish, ignored by most labor unions and governments alike, is freedom.
There’s strong and growing evidence that the “next” US recession has begun — or will begin soon.
As Ayn Rand explains, the antitrust laws are based on confusing two types of power: economic power (sometimes called “market power”) and political power. Only the latter is coercive.
Must the US counteract Beijing’s subsidies with high tariffs?
More than half of imported goods are intermediate items or inputs used in manufacturing. Because the cost of these inputs will rise with the tariffs, total employment in manufacturing and the entire economy will decline or, at best, grow slower.
Selfishness guides business to trade value for value with all parties – wages for employees’ productivity, products and services for customers’ payment, payment for suppliers’ products, and so on – by mutual consent, for mutual benefit, with no deception or fraud. This is the only way business can maximize long-term profits – and the reason it should be selfish.
Just as there’s absolutely no reason for you to worry about the trade deficit that you have with your physician or your grocer, there’s absolutely no reason for us Americans to worry about the trade deficit that America has with China.
Labor is not, in itself, a source of value. Labor is expended in the pursuit of value, and the market process’s competing bids and offers convert people’s individual assessments into intelligible data called prices.
The GOP platform calls for new Buy American restrictions, but this is just warmed-over Bidenomics.
A shortening of the hours of work is a highly desirable goal. But it cannot be achieved along with growing prosperity except in a free market.
If Trump’s goal is simply to eliminate the federal income tax, then he should advocate for doing that and only that.
Americans should ask protectionists such as Donald Trump and Josh Hawley just how America is put ‘first’ by US government trade barriers that constrict ordinary Americans’ freedom to spend their incomes as they choose.
The 1936 Robinson-Patman Act (RPA), once a lynchpin of antitrust enforcement actions, because the government almost always won under its convoluted terms, has been all-but abandoned for decades.
Trump’s proposed reform would make the Fed an arm of the White House. It would be a step in the wrong direction.
We don’t have as much housing as would be necessary to keep housing costs low because it’s illegal. Governments manufacture scarcity by wrapping building permissions in red tape.
A shortening of the hours of work is a highly desirable goal. But it cannot be achieved along with growing prosperity except in a free market.
Fossil fuel companies should say two things when threatened for expressing pro-fossil-fuel opinions: 1) We have a 1st Amendment right to our opinions on energy and climate, and 2) We are now going to talk a lot more about the benefits, including climate benefits, of our industry.
Government spending doesn’t really create jobs, but instead moves them from where people themselves would have chosen to where the government dictates by way of its tax, spending, and regulatory policies.
What should have been a minor economic downturn became the Great Depression because government interventions prevented the market process from working.
Ludwig Von Mises explained why with his Austrian theory of Money, Banking, and the Business Cycle.
Conceptions of “fairness” pursued through taking from those who have produced more and giving it those who have produced less or nothing are morally unjust and economically destructive.
Is there muscle behind the growing push for censorship? Certainly there is. This reality is underscored by the Justice Department’s antitrust actions against Apple.
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