Understanding economics helps you see history better. American workers, although only lightly unionized, were more productive than others. All high standards of living are due to free markets. Governments destroy this. The time required to work in order to earn enough to buy various goods and services has significantly declined through history.
“Advocates of the free market must confront the fact that both the Great Depression and the current financial chaos were preceded by years of laissez-faire economic policies,” write Katrina van den Heuvel, editor of The Nation , and author Eric Schlossel. Knowing full well that inanities like this would become the received version of events, I
“The Therapist” (1937) by Rene Magritte Last weekend, Harvard University sponsored a conference called (I am not making this up) “The Free Market Mindset: History, Psychology, and Consequences.” Its purpose was to try to figure out why, since everyone knows the current crisis amounts to a failure of the market economy, the stupid rubes continue to
[An audio version of this article, read by the author, is available as a free MP3 download .] In case you’ve ever wondered what it must have been like to read Pravda , reading the American media’s treatment of the financial crisis and our wise leaders’ expert management of it all has given everyone a wonderful opportunity. For instance, check
“The time to worry about depressions,” F.A. Hayek once wrote, “is, unfortunately, when they are furthest from the minds of most people.” He’s right, of course: imagine trying to tell a house flipper in 2004 that the housing market was a giant bubble that was going to burst. At best he’d smile politely, and then roll around in his fresh pile of
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.