In deregulating its power system, California seems to have made every mistake possible, writes William Anderson. For starters, it forced utilities to buy power at market rates while capping what they could charge their retail customers. This devastated the utilities. It also sent exactly the wrong signal to consumers, who had no incentive to conserve.
What set in motion the explosive technological advance of the last 250 years was the world of ideas. Great thinkers began to understand the internal logic of the market economy and its potential for liberating mankind from poverty, dependency, and despotic rule.
Free trade is premised on the idea that human relationships should be voluntary and based on mutual consent. It is grounded on the understanding that the material, cultural, and spiritual improvements in the circumstances and conditions of man are best served when the members of the global community of mankind specialize their activities in a world-encompassing social system of division of labor.
Through it all, the libertarian theme was the same: liberty for everyone, legal privileges for no one. This is the essence of a free market, but even today it is a message that no faction within the apparatus of the ruling class wants to hear. No matter how divided the factions are among themselves, they form a united front against the libertarian idea, which is the one thing they find most intolerable.
Ten years ago, Pope John Paul II released Centesimus Annus, an encyclical, at once subtle and sweeping, that addressed the future of the post-communist countries of Europe and the general subject of freedom, society, and faith. Jeff Tucker recalls its meaning.
The most important book in the history of economics was first published more than two and a half centuries ago, but this brilliant work by Richard Cantillon remains a must-read for professional economists and laymen alike.
For many years, freedom and liberty have been in great peril in the United States. A speech by George Reisman
Only real savings and labor, not pieces of paper called money, can create new capital goods. Gene Callahan explains.
Mark Skousen is not easy to satisfy. "In 1980," he informs us, " I asked Murray Rothbard to write an alternative to Robert Heilbroner' s The Wordly Philosophers."
The writings of the great French economist explain why the recent conflict with China has ended through diplomacy and peace rather than belligerence and war, writes Llewellyn Rockwell.
