May 8 marked the 124th anniversary of the birth of F. A. Hayek, the 1974 Nobel-winning economist of the Austrian school. (He died in 1992.) That makes it a good time to acknowledge one of his many contributions, his epistemic case for the free and competitive market...
Politics
What’s Our Best Bet in 2024?
by Dan McKnight | May 12, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Politics
Did you see what Donald Trump said about Ukraine? At a CNN town hall on Wednesday evening, the former president and current candidate announced: “If I’m president, I will have that war settled in one day, 24 hours. I’ll meet with Putin, I’ll meet with Zelensky, they...
TGIF: Free Markets and the Pursuit of Happiness
by Sheldon Richman | Apr 28, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
For some time now I've thought that many people's antagonism to the market is motivated not by moral or economic objections but by aesthetic criteria. (I discuss this in What Social Animals Owe to Each Other and here.) By that I mean they simply find market relations...
Bannon, Guo, Yan: Where a Populist Right Idol Gets His Funding
by Kyle Matovcik | Apr 24, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Politics
As we roll into the 2024 political season, you can rest assured the political right will be posturing more and more against China, while rightfully calling for an end to Ukraine aid. This trend was highlighted by a long line of recent Republican congressional and...
TGIF: Politics Corrupts Money
by Sheldon Richman | Apr 21, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Money does not corrupt politics. Politics corrupts money. Politics as we know it is inherently corrupt; it's the way to select government officials, who then use the legalized threat of physical force, and force itself, to make peaceful people do or not do things...
TGIF: Has Libertarianism Passed Its Sell-By Date?
by Sheldon Richman | Apr 14, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Ron DeSantis, who could be the next president of the United States, made his views frighteningly clear: "We understand that freedom is not just about the absence of restrictions.... I think we have to understand that the threats to freedom are not simply as a result...
TGIF: Let’s NOT Go to War with China
by Sheldon Richman | Apr 7, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman
The word that strikes fear in the power elite is China. It's not fear of an existential threat; rather it's fear that America is becoming second fiddle in world politics. As a result, some believe, or say they believe, that war with China is inevitable. For them,...
Welcome to the World of ‘Novel Legal Theories’
by William Anderson | Apr 4, 2023 | Featured Articles, Politics
When Rudy Giuliani was pursuing his infamous Wall Street prosecutions in the 1980s, his aides admitted that they were indicting people on “novel legal theories” that had not been used before. A Giuliani lieutenant bragged to a group of law students that prosecutors in...