Sheldon Richman | The Libertarian Institute

Freedom and Competition

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 28, 2024 | Blog, Economics

"The freedom of man under capitalism is an effect of competition. The worker does not depend on the good graces of an employer. If his employer discharges him, he finds another employer. The consumer is not at the mercy of the shopkeeper. He is free to patronize another shop if he likes. Nobody must kiss other people’s hands or fear their disfavor. Interpersonal relations are businesslike. the exchange of goods and services is mutual; it is not a favor to sell or to buy, it is a transaction dictated by selfishness on either side. "It is true that in his capacity as a producer every man...

“Mature Capitalism” Ain’t Capitalism

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 27, 2024 | Blog, Economics

"It would be correct to describe this state of affairs in this way: Today many or some groups of business are no longer liberal; they do not advocate a pure market economy and free enterprise, but, on the contrary, are asking for various measures of government interference with business. But it is entirely misleading to say that the meaning of the concept of capitalism has changed and that 'mature capitalism'—as the American Institutionalists call it—or 'late capitalism'—as the Marxians call it—is characterized by restrictive policies to protect the vested interests of wage earners, farmers,...

TGIF: Social Cooperation Versus Violence

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 27, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

The chilling photo of a hooded man cold-bloodedly executing a health-insurance CEO on a busy New York City street should make any decent person pause and reflect. Anyone who even glimpses the role of social cooperation in making life better and longer felt sickened, or should have. Nothing can justify what the perpetrator did. That so many people see him as a vengeful hero acting in defense of the downtrodden is appalling. One can only hope they will soon come to their senses. At the risk of taking our eye off the crime, it's worth pointing out that all departures from the market...

Protecting Vested Interests

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 26, 2024 | Blog, Economics

"There were and there will always be people whose selfish ambitions demand protection for vested interests and who hope to derive advantage from measures restricting competition. Entrepreneurs grown old and tired and the decadent heirs of people who succeeded in the past dislike the agile parvenus who challenge their wealth and their eminent social position. Whether or not their desire to make economic conditions rigid and to hinder improvements can be realized, depends on the climate of public opinion. The ideological structure of the nineteenth century, as fashioned by the prestige of the...

From Savagery to Civilization

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 25, 2024 | Blog, Economics

"The market economy is a man-made mode of acting under the division of labor. But this does not imply that it is something accidental or artificial and could be replaced by another mode. The market economy is the product of a long evolutionary process. It is the outcome of man’s endeavors to adjust his action in the best possible way to the given conditions of his environment that he cannot alter. It is the strategy, as it were, by the application of which man has triumphantly progressed from savagery to civilization." —Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

What Corporatism Actually Is

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 24, 2024 | Blog, Economics

"The fundamental idea both of guild socialism and of corporativism is that every branch of business forms a monopolistic body, the guild or corporazione. This entity enjoys full autonomy; it is free to settle all its internal affairs without interference of external factors and of people who are not themselves members of the guild. The mutual relations between the various guilds are settled by direct bargaining from guild to guild or by the decisions of a general assembly of the delegates of all guilds. In the regular course of affairs the government does not interfere at all. Only in...

Good Plan Means My Plan

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 23, 2024 | Blog, Economics

"All this passionate praise of the supereminence of government action is but a poor disguise for the individual interventionist’s self-deification. The great god State is a great god only because it is expected to do exclusively what the individual advocate of interventionism wants to see achieved. Only that plan is genuine which the individual planner fully approves. All other plans are simply counterfeit. In saying 'plan' what the author of a book on the benefits of planning has in mind is, of course, his own plan alone. He does not take into account the possibility that the plan which the...

Who Needs What?

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 22, 2024 | Blog, Economics

"[I]t is evident ... that the man, who first made himself clothes and built himself a cabin, supplied himself with things which he did not much want, since he had lived without them till then; and why should he not have been able to support in his riper years, the same kind of life, which he had supported from his infancy?" —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Equality "Under laissez faire, says the planner, it is not those goods which people 'really' need that are produced, but those goods from the sale of which the highest returns are expected. It is the objective of planning to direct...