Free Markets

Bob Murphy Interviews George Mason University economist Donald Boudreaux.

The North American fur trade is in decline. Unfortunately, many think that the solution is for the government to step in to “protect” trappers from market competition.

In spite of all kinds of restrictions and red tape, consumer demand for firearms remains high, and the industry has found a way to meet that demand—through "80 percent lower receivers."

Whether diversity is a social benefit depends on whether it creates excuses to fight each other for special treatment. Politicizing our differences is far more likely to make diversity a source of conflict.

Entrepreneurs are the reason consumers have come to expect new gains and innovations in products and services every year. Without entrepreneurs, we'd still be using rotary phones.

Private ownership of the means of production is the fundamental institution of the market economy. It is the institution the presence of which characterizes the market economy as such. Where it is absent, there is no question of a market economy.

Hoarding is not even a very disruptive process, because for every miser stuffing money into his mattress, there are numerous misers' heirs ferreting it out. This has always been the case, and it is not likely to change drastically.

It is true that if labor becomes more efficient, workers must find other uses for the time they now have available. But why is this a problem? Human beings have unlimited wants, and there are always new uses for human labor.

Clearly marked prices on private-sector cash-payment surgeries are a great thing. In fact, the competition of for-profit surgery centers drives down prices at more "traditional" (i.e., highly bureaucratized) hospitals.

Keynes and Hazlitt: their lives and loyalties are a study in contrast — and mostly of choices born of internal conviction, in Hazlitt's case, or lack thereof, in Keynes's case.