As long as government secures and protects private property rights, enforces all contracts entered into voluntarily and through mutual agreement, and assures law and order under an impartial rule of law, “monopoly” as an economic or social problem is virtually non-existent. But introduce government intervention into the market system, and monopoly invariably becomes a social harm and an economic problem.
The first age of globalization could have started much earlier had it not been for trade policies. How much earlier? At least a century, which means somewhere in the mid-18th century.
Whichever definition one prefers to use — an expansion of the money supply which leads to price increases, or a broad and sustained increase in consumer prices — inflation is caused by the governments and central banks who control the money supply.
Hazlitt’s most important contribution was his consistent defense of the central importance of liberty in American life, even though it lost him more than one job. At a time when real commitment to liberty is scarce, Americans need to remember his wisdom.
The political, economic, and moral case for a free market in housing.
Obamacare plans are often “junkier” than available short-term plans for a large number of Americans in a large number of circumstances.
Justice demands that we should celebrate Amazon rather than persecute it.
Antitrust laws, as being applied by Lina Khan, are truly anti-progress.
One of the DOJ’s main criticisms is how Google established itself early on as the default search engine for Apple and Android products, yet doing so was simply shrewd business strategy. Anyone with the opportunity to do so would have done the same.
Economic freedom in the world has plunged in recent years, due mainly to the interventions and fiscal-monetary profligacy associated with COVID shutdowns, mandates, and subsidies. The global measure is given in Figure One. This is a significant reversal of freedom’s...
A stronger argument to defend capitalism and business against government coercion is needed. It comes from morality.
Proposals for a moratorium on land sales risk making the restoration a lengthier and more wasteful affair.
I for one would be devastated if my cordless Dyson was never given the chance, and I wonder what other innovations or advancements may now be lost thanks to a true monopoly obstructing competition in the marketplace – the FTC.
Consumers will choose the best options, or only options, according to their interests and perceptions of value – and companies can either cater to existing needs and wants or create new ones. That is why capitalism is such a beautiful thing, and why the only time monopoly concerns should arise is when government cronyism is involved.
On the growing coalition countering capitalism for the “common good.”
History provides very few actual examples of private firms that are unprotected by government-erected barriers to entry successfully colluding in ways that harm consumers.
The conventional tale of trade deficits fails so utterly to square with reality because tellers of this conventional tale never seriously bother to attempt to understand why foreigners are willing, decade after decade, to send to America more goods and services than they receive in return from America.
Describing as “favorable” a situation in which the people of the home country ship many real goods and services to foreigners and receive in exchange lesser amounts of real goods and services, with the difference made up in money, is indeed – as Adam Smith called it – absurd.
Herny Hazlitt was a popularizer of sound economic thinking, a critic of John Maynard Keynes, and a contributor to ethical moral philosophy. Not bad for a poor fatherless boy and college dropout.
Since the late 1960s US yield-curve inversions have predicted all eight US recessions, beginning roughly a year in advance.
Economics proves the existence of a harmony of the rational self-interests of all participants in the economic system—a harmony which permeates the institutions of private ownership of the means of production, economic inequality, and economic competition.
Did you work to make or take advantage of your own luck?
Capitalism is denounced as “an anarchy of production,” a chaos ruled by “exploiters,” “robber barons,” and “profiteers,” who “coldly,” “calculatingly,” “heartlessly,” and “greedily” consume the efforts and destroy the lives of the broad masses of average, innocent people.
The proper, moral attitude toward great achievers, those who have merit, is admiration.
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