Free Markets

We are told ad nauseum that the capitalist system runs on greed. In reality, a successful economy depends mostly upon trust.

In this week’s Friday Philosophy, Dr. David Gordon takes on Daron Acemoglu’s What Happened to Liberal Democracy? Remaking a Politics of Shared Prosperity and finds it lacking in economic sense.

The up and down experience with free markets in Eastern Europe following the fall of the Iron Curtain shows that free markets, while undermining the state, do not operate apart from state interference.

Thatcher, Clinton, Obama, Trump—everyone gets called a neoliberal, which is why most free-market economists say the word means nothing. Tho Bishop argues it names something precise.

The up and down experience with free markets in Eastern Europe following the fall of the Iron Curtain shows that free markets, while undermining the state, do not operate apart from state interference.

Tuition is up 1,200% since 1980. Enrollment is about to fall off a cliff. Peter Klein argues the real problem isn't any of the things people usually name.

Sociologists blame job instability. Legal scholars blame deregulation. Jeffrey Degner noticed all the clues point back to the same address: the Federal Reserve.

We assume people are self-interested in the market and selfless in government. Tate Fegley on why dropping that double standard explains almost everything about how the state actually behaves.

Everyone wants the one key to economic growth—capital, or technology, or trade. Shawn Ritenour argues there is no single key, and that's exactly what the models keep missing.

A Nobel laureate says some markets are too repugnant to allow and need clever redesign instead. Sandy Klein has a simpler answer: repugnance is just a preference, and the price system already knows what to do with it.