A parent who puts a child behind a loom for ten hours a day does so, not out of callous greed, but because this is what brings food to the table. Economic development is the precondition for all that is good and humane.
The well-known problem of the tyranny of the majority is present in both corporate/investor democracies and political democracies. What sets one apart from the other are the remedies available to the disgruntled minority.
Libertarians have not come to promise human beings a technocratic utopia; we have come to bring everyone freedom, the freedom of each individual to pursue whatever his or her dreams of the future may be. Or even to have no vision of the future.
Mencken saw the implications of where his thinking was leading him and he acknowledged those implications frankly. "I am," he wrote in <em>The Smart Set</em> in 1922, "a libertarian of the most extreme variety."
Obama says that the key to progress is good government. Not so. The real common thread to progress is free enterprise. Progress and prosperity have followed movement toward freer markets and secure property rights.
In their eagerness to eliminate from history any reference to individuals and individual events, collectivist authors resorted to a chimerical construction, the group mind or social mind.
One by one, Mises discusses and dispatches the pillars of progressive dogma: government spending can create jobs for the unemployed; the service motive is better than the profit motive; government choices are superior to individual choices.
One does not need to be a Brookings Institute scholar— specializing in "oil dependence, electric vehicles, and climate change" — to see why no one will willingly purchase an all-electric car, much less the one million that President Obama wants on the nation's highways in five years.
Groupon is a brilliant concept that uses social networking to mobilize shoppers and bring down prices. In contrast to all the mainstream economic models of "market failure," Groupon is yet another example of market success.
