Monopoly and Competition

Labor unions are flexing their muscles again. Last year, a strike against the New York Daily News succeeded in inflicting such losses upon the company that it was forced to sell cheap to British tycoon Robert Maxwell, who was willing to accept union terms. Earlier, the bus drivers' union struck Greyhound and managed to win a long and bloody strike. How were the unions able to win these strikes, even though unions have been declining in numbers and popularity since the end of World War II? 

Poor IBM. Apparently big isn't necessarily better in the relatively free computer market. How will IBM ever get the public to buy its fancy, expensive personal computers or pick its new operating system? How can IBM stop ACE?

Sometimes it seems that our entire apparatus of economic education: countless courses, students, professors, textbooks, backed up—in the case of oil pricing—by a decade of experience in the 1970s, is a gigantic waste of time. Certainly it seems that way when we ponder the near-universal reaction to the Kuwait crisis.

Any business owner whose employees deliberately set out to harass and even endanger customers could do only one thing: fire the offenders, and maybe sue them for damages as well. Nothing else would be compatible with free-enterprise and private property. But thanks to a whole host of government interventions, unionized companies like Eastern Airlines cannot take the actions that morality and economics would dictate. 

Mark Shields, a columnist for the Washington Post, recently wrote of President Reagan's "blind devotion to the doctrine of free trade." If President Reagan has a devotion to free trade, it must be blind because he has been way off the mark. In fact, he has been the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover.

Presented by Murray N. Rothbard in 1986 at New York Polytechnic University. Recorded by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

Economic myths are perpetuated by the government to keep control over the printing presses.

Imperialism takes many forms, and is driven by many motivations, but its result has this in common with all forms of state interventions: it fails

Mises View videos are short takes by Mises faculty on issues of interest in the headlines and current affairs from the perspective of Austrian econ

Murray N. Rothbard writes “A society without a state is not only viable; it is the only one consistent with natural rights.”