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The recent incident at a Philadelphia Starbucks in which police arrested two black men who were waiting for a friend to join them has stirred a lot of controversy and brought bad publicity to the coffee chain. Facing demonstrations accusing the company of racism , the Starbucks management even closed some of its stores for one day in May so that

Nearly 40 years ago, Lawrence Reed published “Seven Fallacies of Economics” in The Freeman in which he noted that much of what the public believes about economics is fallacious because most people fail to understand simple opportunity cost. Given the current trends in political economy, it is a sad certainty that most if not all of the fallacies

  Volume 2, No. 4 (Winter 1999)   Couch and  Shughart’s  book brings together a number of public-choice studies  by other authors which have appeared in various journals, but have never been formally connected to each other in a single book. The authors also perform their own statistical tests, using data discovered by Leonard  Arrington  in 1969

  Volume 3, No. 3 (Fall 2000)   While criticizing the behavior of Austrian economists,  Laband  and  Tollison  assert that their purpose is not to “knock” Austrian economics. However, even though they assert that Austrian economics has failed the academic “market test,” they never explain just what it is that makes the Austrian paradigm such a

  Volume 5, No. 2 (Summer 2002)   I appreciate the fact that the author attempts to construct logical rather than mathematical arguments, as seems to be the disease that has struck most of the economics profession at the present time. It is at this point that I begin my analysis of what Olson writes.  Power and Prosperity  is an attempt to examine

  Volume 6, No. 1 (Spring 2003)   One is not intellectually free to use the neoclassical theory of the firm at one time to explain economic action, and to discard it at another.  If the theory of the firm does not apply in all explanations of firm behavior, then it cannot apply at all. If economists cannot explain the theory of predatory pricing

  Volume 8, No. 4 (Winter 2005)   This paper has incorporated challenges to the dominant neoclassical model that were fashioned by  Rothbard  and, to a much lesser extent,  Baumol . In examining the work of both economists, we conclude that the  Rothbard  model is more complete, as it factors time into the model, where  Baumol’s  does not, which

The Free Market 20, no. 11 (November 2002)   As the markets continue to wallow in bear territory, and as consumer—and, more important, investor—confidence falls, writers and commentators of all stripes have weighed in to give their two cents’ worth concerning the key question: who or what is at fault?  Not surprisingly, Democrats have

The Free Market 21, no. 1 (January 2003)   When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union ceased to exist two years later, many western commentators optimistically declared that socialism had fallen with those two entities. However, as we limp from one economic morass into another, it has become clear that the dream of socialism is far

The Free Market 21, no. 2 (February 2003)   Late last year, in a move that gives even politics a bad name, the Federal Reserve announced yet another cut in its key interest rates. Around the same time, Fed Governor Ben Bernanke gave a speech praising the power of alchemy to lower the price of gold, and, similarly, the power of the Fed to print as