Sheldon Richman | The Libertarian Institute

TGIF: Markets Clean Up

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 16, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Donald Boudreaux, a professor of economics at George Mason University, has been a great defender of individual liberty for a long time. One of his favorite projects is pointing out how innovative and usually unnewsworthy market activity, to the extent that government keeps out of the way, increasingly helps us to live in cleaner, healthier surroundings. In other words, if "the environment" matters for human well-being -- and it certainly does -- the freer that markets are, that is, the freer that we are, the better for everyone. Freedom and the wealth it generates on net make our world...

TGIF: Condemning Tyranny Abroad and War

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 9, 2023 | Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Can foreign-policy noninterventionists publicly criticize foreign tyrannies without giving credence to the war party? Yes -- if they try. At least I hope so. Being a noninterventionist does not require agnosticism about, much less approval of, despotic regimes. U.S. war, of course, threatens the liberty and lives of Americans, not to mention foreigners. That's why Randolph Bourne wrote, "War is the health of the state." When private individuals condemn tyranny abroad and U.S. war against it, they are pursuing the same cause. That many people who denounce tyranny in Russia, China, and...

TGIF: Immigration and Liberty

by Sheldon Richman | Jun 2, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Foreign Policy, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Forbidding freedom of movement to aspiring migrants strikes at the liberty not only of those individuals but also of citizens and legal residents of the United States. That's the way it is with immigration. Indeed, that's the way it is with freedom. The government can't violate the freedom of some peaceful people without also violating the freedom of others. Ilya Somin, who teaches law at George Mason University and is a constitutional scholar with the Cato Institute, makes this point in "Three Constitutional Issues Libertarians Should Make Their Own." (The other two issues his title refers...

TGIF: The Knowledge that Only Free Markets Disclose

by Sheldon Richman | May 26, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Libertarianism, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

As a follow-up to my recent article about F. A. Hayek's classic article "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945), I thought it worth extending Hayek's exploration of this area of social theory. In 1968 the Nobel laureate-economist delivered a lecture in German known in English as "Competition as a Discovery Procedure." It's an alluring title, and anyone concerned with what makes for a good and prosperous society should be familiar with Hayek's basic point. Hayek gets right to it. He notes that standard macroeconomists are guilty of having "investigated competition primarily under assumptions...

TGIF: No One Has a Right to Make Immigration Policy

by Sheldon Richman | May 19, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says "no one has a right to immigrate" to the United States. "We determine as Americans," he says, "what type of immigration system benefits our country. When you're doing immigration, it's not for their benefit as foreigners. It's for your benefit as Americans. So if there's legal immigration that's harming America, we shouldn't do that either." I'd turn that around and say that no one, including a state legislature, has a right to forbid or restrict immigration, the peaceful movement of individuals from outside to inside America. That doesn't mean that landowners...

TGIF: Ducking Hayek

by Sheldon Richman | May 12, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

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 order. It's well-suited to the information age. One of Hayek's best-known articles was published in 1945 in the American Economic Review: "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (reprinted in Individualism and Economic Order). He got right to the point: What is the problem we wish to solve when we try to construct a rational economic...

TGIF: Abolish Billionaires?

by Sheldon Richman | May 5, 2023 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Sen. Bernie Sanders wants to abolish billionaires. You read that right. He says he'd confiscate 100 percent of people's money above the $999 million mark -- as if that would cover a significant portion of the nearly $7 trillion the feds will spend in the next fiscal year. Even if the government stole everything over $1 million, the money wouldn't go very far. The rich don't have enough money to finance the profligate state, and they wouldn't submit to the tax collector even if they did: incentives matter. But no matter -- raising revenue is not Sanders's goal. He just wants to deprive people...

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 -- involving private property, contracts, profit, competition, and "impersonal forces" such as supply and demand -- unattractive, even ugly. They wish society had nothing to do with such relations, which they (mistakenly) believe have displaced the cozy cooperation and communalism that marked an earlier golden age. They long to...