The foundation of our economy is the patent. If you invent something, you need a patent. We assume that without patent law, society would be stuck in an economic malaise. We'd be stuck in the Dark Ages. However, that isn't true. The opposite is. Patents hold our...
Economics
Inflation Hits 40-Year High at 9.1%
by Ryan McMaken | Jul 14, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles
The U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics released new Consumer Price Index inflation estimates this morning, and the official numbers for June 2022 show that price inflation has risen to 9.1 percent year over year. That's the biggest number since November 1981, when the...
Living With the Cuban Revolution, 60 Years Later
by Carlos Martinez | Jul 12, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles
In his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Robert Nozick has a chapter named "The Tale of the Slave" in which he explains the nine phases from the most restrictive to more liberating states of slavery. He writes that even though enslaved people have certain forms of...
Richard Cobden on the Link between Free Trade and Peace
by Sheldon Richman | Jul 12, 2022 | Blog, Economics, Foreign Policy, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics
I see in the Free-trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe,—drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace. I have...
TGIF: Why Can’t You Shout “Fire!” in the Virtual Public Square?
by Sheldon Richman | Jul 8, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Almost 10 years ago the free-speech champion Trevor Timm, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation at the time and now with the Free of the Press Foundation, implored readers "to stop using the ‘fire in a crowded theater’ quote" to justify limits on free expression....
Not a ‘Soft Landing,’ But a Crash
by Daniel Lacalle | Jun 20, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles
After more than a decade of chained stimulus packages and extremely low rates, with trillions of dollars of monetary stimulus fueling elevated asset valuations and incentivizing an enormous leveraged bet on risk, the idea of a controlled explosion or a “soft landing”...
TGIF: Free Exchange Is Win-Win
by Sheldon Richman | Jun 17, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
With the possible exception of the political class and its cronies, most of us would be healthier, wealthier, happier, and freer if the public knew how to engage in "the economic way of thinking." The late Paul Heyne, who wrote a popular textbook by that name (now in...
‘ESG,’ the Threat to Liberty You Haven’t Heard Of
by Tommy Salmons | Jun 16, 2022 | Economics, Featured Articles
In March of 2020 COVID-19 spread to the shores of the United States, introducing a medical threat that had all the signs of devastating families from sea to shining sea. But in the shadows, slipping in under the veil of a potentially deadly pandemic, another threat...