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The great economic error of mercantilism is the belief that foreign buyers are great but foreign sellers are not, and thus are barriers to imports necessary. For a nation at large, this error can be extremely costly because it dooms producers in the home country to inefficient lines of production and foists unnecessarily high prices on consumers.

A libertarian must never tire of saying “I told you so.” Nor is there a dearth of opportunities to do so. Before 9-11, for example, it was the libertarians who said that 1990s sanctions against Iraq and broader intervention in the Middle East would inspire terrorism. The libertarians also warned that FAA regulations weren’t really making the

This much we know: prosperous nations have the fewest barriers to trade, while poor nations have the most. That fact alone does not prove the case for free trade, but adding a bit of logic sews up the case. The wider the pool from which a country can draw labor and capital, the more likely it is that resources will be used efficiently and to the

Many states have enacted higher minimum wage laws than are imposed by the federal government. The federal minimum is $5.15 per hour, whereas in Washington State it will soon be $7.16. A proposal in Madison, Wisconsin , would raise it to $7.75. “Living wage” legislation in 110 local governments imposes wages as high as $10. Senator Kennedy is

Donald Rumsfeld puts on a good face for the public, but a remarkable  internal memo reveals startling confusion. “We lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror,” he writes. “Is our current situation such that ‘the harder we work, the behinder we get’?” There you have it: a typical government program. Hundreds of

The Bush administration has slapped high duties on Chinese TV sets for the alleged problem of “dumping”—which increasingly means selling at prices lower than sets sold by established firms.   Let’s leave the issue of dumping for now and examine the claim that jobs are being shipped overseas, which is usually what is said when great foreign

France is a socialist country, and so is its most important newspaper, Le Monde . When its editors grew concerned over the global rise of the Austrian School and pro-free market ideas, they sent a reporter to spend a week at its source: the Mises Institute. The result was a  full-page story about our work and ideas. For a newspaper, it was pretty

This talk was delivered at the Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, on December 12, 2003. Critics accuse libertarians of reveling in government failures. Yes and No. No one is pleased to see the destruction caused by government policies, whether small scale, as when a tighter regulation causes business failures, or

A common accusation against libertarianism is that we are unnaturally obsessed with tracing social and economic problems to the state, and, in doing so, we oversimplify the world. If you let the people who say this keep talking, they will explain to you why the state is not all bad, that some of its actions yield positive results and, in any case,

A thousand years ago, technology severely limited the amount of words the average literate person could read in a lifetime. Manuscripts were available only to those privileged enough to get their hands on hand-copied editions (and thank goodness for them). Then came printing. Even so, only two centuries ago, it was possible to read most everything