8. Regulation and Public Utilities

Tags: Interventionism, Monopoly and Competition, Big Government

01/18/2010 Murray N. Rothbard

State dominated cartels used intellectuals as apologists for the government. Big unionism was to transmit orders to the working class. Public utilities were government monopolies for fifty year terms, run without any checks by the public. It is the function of government to run everything. Regulation was rampant, e.g. prohibition. Social workers wanted to abolish the saloons. German brewers were suspect of weakening soldiers. Constitutional amendment outlawed liquor.

Lecture 8 of 13 presented in Fall of 1986 at the New York Polytechnic University.

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.

Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.