Sheldon Richman | The Libertarian Institute

TGIF: Happy Halloween, Traders!

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 25, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

It's the Halloween season, the perfect occasion to introduce your young children and grandchildren to the wonders of the market economy. After all, the market is a process in which individuals strive to improve their situations through trade—that is, lucrative peaceful cooperation—with others. (Today we'll ignore all the ways politicians and bureaucrats get in the way.) As a result of their trick-or-treating, children will bring home a vast quantity and variety of candies. Of course, not all kids (or adults) like the same kind of treats. While that could bring disappointment for some...

TGIF: Socialism Is War by Other Means

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 18, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Readers may have wondered about a quote I used from Ludwig von Mises recently. In his book Liberalism Mises distinguished the (classical) liberal case against war from what he called the "humanitarian" case against war. To understand Mises, let's examine a "humanitarian" on the war question: philosopher, psychologist, and eugenicist William James (1842-1910). Is it relevant to the largely illiberal antiwar movement today? Let's see. Whether Mises was thinking of James when the great economist wrote the "peace" section of Liberalism (1926), I cannot say. He may well have. James had given a...

Blaming Freedom

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 17, 2024 | Blog, Economics

Freedom is nearly always blamed for the bad consequences of unfreedom, that is, of government intervention. Take immigration. We hear these days that migrant gangs are killing, terrorizing, and stealing from Americans. Some immigrants without government papers have definitely committed heinous crimes. Opponents of immigration say that migrants join violent migrant gangs to pay off debts incurred in the process of traveling to the United States. If that's true, we can see that it's not freedom that leads to crime, but rather the black market. Black markets by definition are products of...

The Soul of a Socialist

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 12, 2024 | Blog, Economics, Foreign Policy

From the pen of H. G. Wells (1908), socialist: War is a collective concern; to turn one’s back upon it, to refuse to consider it as a possibility, is to leave it entirely to those who are least prepared to deal with it in a broad spirit. In many ways war is the most socialistic of all forces. In many ways military organization is the most peaceful of activities. When the contemporary man steps from the street, of clamorous insincere advertisement, push, adulteration, underselling and intermittent employment into the barrack-yard, he steps on to a higher social plane, into an atmosphere of...

TGIF: Full versus Shrunken Liberalism

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 11, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, History, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Language, like the old common law and other customs, is a decentralized, undesigned, spontaneous institution. It serves humanity well. Nothing is perfect, of course, but no alternative—if one were conceivable—could hold a candle to it. One of the downsides is that people may change how they use handy expressions; more wordy phrases may be needed to replace a "corrupted" one. Here's one: classical liberal. Liberal, of course, originally related to individual liberty and its conditions and consequences: private property, constraints on government power, and free markets. It still means...

Richman Interviewed on “Ideas Having Sex”

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 8, 2024 | Blog, Libertarianism

Chris Kaufman interviewed me about my book What Social Animals Owe to Each Other on his podcast Ideas Having Sex. Listen here or on your podcast platform.

TGIF: Tariffying Trade-Warmonger Trump

by Sheldon Richman | Oct 4, 2024 | Economics, Foreign Policy, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

"The word tariff, properly used, is a beautiful word. One of the most beautiful words I’ve ever heard. It’s music to my ears." —Donald Trump The once and possibly future president threatens to wage economic warfare against countries and companies everywhere if they don't knuckle under to his nationalist demands. He promises to impose tariffs on American firms that calculate that moving operations to Mexico or other foreign locations makes good business sense. He's also ready to strike at allied countries that irritate him by, say, slighting the dollar. (Watch or read his economic-policy...

TGIF: Who Cares about Inequality?

by Sheldon Richman | Sep 27, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

What accounts for the preoccupation with income and wealth inequality? We hear about it every day. Isn't our absolute living standard what matters and whether it is improving or deteriorating? I'll bet that's what regular people care about. However, the professional grievance mongers see things differently, They want you to resent those who are richer. To start with the basics, we are not talking about inequality. We're talking about income and wealth differences. Substitution of the term inequality is an appeal to emotion, a cashing in on other senses of the word. "You oppose equality?...