Free Republic

The news media are in the process of creating a great new historical myth. This is the myth that our present financial crisis is the result of economic freedom and laissez-faire capitalism...

An almost hysterical antagonism toward the gold standard is one issue which unites statists of all persuasions. They seem to sense - perhaps more clearly and subtly than many consistent defenders of laissez-faire - that gold and economic freedom are inseparable, that the gold standard is an instrument of laissez-faire and that each implies and requires the other. In order to understand the source of their antagonism, it is necessary first to understand the specific role of gold in a free society. Money is the common denominator of all economic transactions. It is that commodity which serves as a medium...

The latest staggering atrocity from the cloaca of business-and-finance as reported by AP at the end of last week: Pfizer Inc.'s former chief executive, Henry A. McKinnell, who was forced into early retirement in part because of investor anger about his rich retirement benefits, will get a retirement package totaling more than $180 million, a new regulatory filing shows. McKinnell's package, which the company disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, included an estimated $82.3 million in pension benefits, $77.9 million in deferred compensation and cash and stock totaling more than $20.7 million. In other...

This is Mises's 1927 review of J. M. Keynes, The End of Laissez-Faire, Ideas on the Unification of Private and Social Economy (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker and Humblot, 1926), 40 pages, translated for the first time here (by Joseph Stromberg). It originally appeared as Mises, "Das Ende des Laissez-Faire, Ideen zur Verbindung von Privat- und Gemeinwirtschaft". Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft. 82(1927) 190-91. A review of a lecture given by John M. Keynes in Berlin. This text reproduces an address given by the English economist John Maynard Keynes on June 23, 1926, at the University of Berlin. It makes a...

I seldom use the words, “moral imperative,” and, when I do, they carry behind them an urgent necessity for rational individuals to respond to an imminent threat to the inalienable rights of man. In this Presidential election, however, I see a clear moral imperative to defeat the power grab of a man who would endanger the sacred liberties of every man dwelling in America, but especially of the most autonomous and industrious among us. I shall enumerate, in brief, a horrid threefold menace that a would-be Kerry administration poses to our freedoms across the board. - Kerry’s national health insurance...

Rolling Back Government: Lessons from New Zealand If we look back through history, growth in government has been a modern phenomenon. Beginning in the 1850s and lasting until the 1920s or ’30s, the government’s share of GDP in most of the world’s industrialized economies was about six percent. From that period onwards – and particularly since the 1950s – we’ve seen a massive explosion in government share of GDP, in some places as much as 35-45 percent. (In the case of Sweden, of course, it reached 65 percent, and Sweden nearly self-destructed as a result. It is now starting to...

Fascinating and thought-provoking article that highlights an overlooked problem around the world. Conservatives understand that democracy has prerequisites, and Amy Chua's work draws our attention to some situations where promoting free-market deregulation and democracy at the same time can literally be a recipe for ethnic persecution and even genocide. As Chua notes, similar dynamics exist in some parts of the USA - she uses the American-Koreans in black neighbourhoods of L.A. as an example of this dynamic where a "market dominant" minority becomes a target for racial demagogues, leading to violence (and in the end, more poverty as investment leaves)....

Imagine a country within the Western world, in which elections are rigged like in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, private enterprises are expropriated as a matter of routine, land is farmed collectively, like in the days of medieval serfdom, and every workplace has been recently mandated to hold government-approved “ideological seminars.” Sounds like Orwellian fiction? Not quite. Or an all-dominating Stalinist behemoth? Closer, but still seventy years away. This country exists today, adjacent to the prosperous liberalizing lands of New Europe. It is Belarus, and it is governed by Europe’s last despot, Alexander Lukashenko. Following its separation from the Soviet Union in 1991,...

The Betrayal of Checks and Balances The philosophy of Ayn Rand has taught me and numerous other thinkers of the new intellectual Renaissance the moral groundwork for laissez-faire capitalism as the sole economic system which fully and unequivocally recognizes the individual’s objective prerequisites to survival, his natural rights of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, and property. With slight loopholes, this was the implicit philosophy behind the founding of America, and the principal force in its first one hundred fifty years of development. Yet, in the words of Aristotle, "The least initial deviation from the truth gets multiplied later a thousandfold.”...

If Sam Waksal had read Atlas Shrugged, he may have walked free. In a memorable scene in Atlas Shrugged, Hank Rearden, a self-made steel magnate, sat, like Waksal, in a courtroom, on trial. Rearden, like Waksal,had violated the law. Rearden's crime had been to sell four thousand tons of Rearden Metal, his own creation and property, the result of ten years of his arduous labor, to a customer of his choice, in violation of a law that dictated what quantities and to whom he could sell. Rearden, like Waksal, had "cheated the law" and "broken the national regulations designed to...

For a century after the Civil War, blacks in America's South were subjected to shameful acts of oppression and violence. Deprived of voice and vote, they had no choice but to suffer mutely as they were scurrilously attacked. Two California-based lawsuits indicate that a new minority scapegoat has been thrust, disarmed and disenfranchised, into the crosshairs. No, it is not a racial, ethnic, or religious minority. In Ayn Rand's words, now validated vividly by California's legal system, America's new persecuted minority is Big Business. Consider the suit filed recently by two tobacco giants, R.J. Reynolds and Lorillard, in an attempt...

On May 31, 1819, Walt Whitman was born in West Hills, New York. Many believe that Whitman was America's greatest poet and that his Leaves of Grass is the most influential poetry volume in American literature. According to the Columbia Encyclopedia, Whitman's poetry "celebrated the freedom and dignity of the individual." But that celebration was not limited to his poetry. It is also reflected in the all-but-overlooked prose he penned during an extensive career as a journalist and editor. Anyone who writes of individual freedom must consider the role of government, and Whitman was no exception. His views were well...

Recently I have had the privilege of embarking upon a guided tour of one of Illinois Tool Works’ 600 mini-companies, a strap manufacturing plant near the company’s headquarters in Glenview, Illinois. Signode Strap, a product invented within a firm owned by ITW, is the most prevalent of its sort in the market. It is furnished of entirely recyclable materials (pop bottle remnants) into gargantuan plastic sheets that are conveyed through rollers at phenomenal temperatures of over 300 degrees Fahrenheit. I was able to observe the plastic rolled into colossal coils, then unwound again to be sliced into uniform strips, while...

May Day will once again be celebrated by left-wing and environmentalist protestors united by a single emotion: a virulent hatred of capitalism, especially global capitalism. Why the hatred? The advantage of a global economy based on free trade and capitalism is so obvious and so enormous that it is difficult to conceive of anyone opposing it. The benefit is based on the law of comparative advantage: every country becomes more prosperous the more it invests in producing and exporting what it does best (in terms of quality, cost, uniqueness, etc.), and importing goods and services that other countries can produce...

Author's note: This is a short story that seeks to penetrate to the core of a conflict in modern society which places the entire destiny of human progress on the line. It is NOT a blurry post-modern perceptually-bound depiction, but rather a conflict of ideas with characters bound by only their own volition. Be prepared for a plot relevant to the most pervasive questions of human existence, and a style that harkens back to a time when rational humanism in writing was the rule, not the exception. Scott Denning, his face prematurely creased, wizened, and blemished by years of tanning,...

Americans remember Benjamin Franklin as one of our founding fathers. And well they should, as he was not just our most famous citizen at our country's birth, he was a central part of that birth. As a member of the Second Continental Congress, Franklin helped draft the Declaration of Independence. As a member of the Constitutional Convention, he helped draft the Constitution. Both documents bear his signature. He also signed the Treaty of Alliance with France, bringing the colonies French aid against the British, and The Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War and recognized the independence of the...

Note: This is the second in a line of essays, the first of which can be found at http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Collectivism.html. Yet it seems in the Party rhetoric that the survival of man (with that of the individual, as has been demonstrated in previous chains of reasoning, being a required precursor to that of the species) is an aim which the tyrants deliberately avoid. O'Brien concedes this as well. "Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference would it make? Can you not...

By the "benevolent nature of capitalism," I mean the fact that it promotes human life and well-being and does so for everyone. There are many such insights, which have been developed over more than three centuries, by a series of great thinkers, ranging from John Locke to Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand. I present as many of them as I can in my book Capitalism. I'm going to briefly discuss about a dozen or so of these insights that I consider to be the most important, and which I believe, taken all together, make the case for capitalism irresistible....

MR. EDMUND DALEFORD: The Case for Euthanasia: Opening Arguments: This nation philosophically rests upon the principle of individual rights. Rights, in a nutshell, are negative obligations. One's right to life implies that other entities cannot intervene with one's attempts to live and to live better. It does not imply an obligation on the part of society or private individuals to keep one alive at their expense, nor does it endow society with the authority to dictate the means by which the pursuit of one's life can be undertaken. In essence this grants the individual sole ownership of his life and...

The other day I was asked to comment on something called "laissez-faire socialism" and what I thought about American conservatism as a political ideology. This was my response. "Laissez-Faire socialism" is a contradiction in terms. Socialism involves government ownership and control over industry and under pure socialism each and every citizen is owned by the collective and has no rights -- only whatever the government decides to give him or her. Work becomes compulsory for each and all (see Marx's Communist Manifesto's ten planks). Under hard-core socialism, all economic activity is rigidly controlled by a clique of central planners...