"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...
Economics
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...
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...
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...
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...
Whose Plan?
by Sheldon Richman | Dec 21, 2024 | Blog, Economics
"The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is whose planning? Should each member of society plan for himself, or should a benevolent government alone plan for them all? The issue is not automatism versus conscious action; it is autonomous action of each...
What Full Liberalism Is Not About
by Sheldon Richman | Dec 20, 2024 | Blog, Economics
"Liberalism is a doctrine directed entirely towards the conduct of men in this world. In the last analysis, it has nothing else in view than the advancement of their outward, material welfare and does not concern itself directly with their inner, spiritual and...
TGIF: The Unfortunately Forgotten Sumner
by Sheldon Richman | Dec 20, 2024 | Economics, Justice, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Some things haven't changed since 1883. In that year Yale University professor William Graham Sumner, the anti-imperialist laissez-faire liberal and pioneer of American sociology, noticed that "we are told every day that great social problems stand before us and...