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The Natural Rights of Man and the Limits of Government Patrick Baron In The Law, Frédéric Bastiat presents the irrefutable maxim that human rights precede the formation of the state and, therefore, the collective actions of rulers cannot conflict with these primary rights. According to Bastiat, one can delegate to the state only those …

Gregory Brasiger Over the past 80 years, governments have been expected to provide more and more social services. This means ever-increasing costs to taxpayers, both ours and future generations yet to be born. Since governments have been almost constantly running in the red, they have become like cocaine addicts desperately looking for their next …

Frank Hollenbeck The gap between rich and poor continues to widen. In 1975, the richest 1% of the population held 8% of the economic pie; now they own over 20%. This is a striking change from the 1950s and 1960s, when the richest owned just over 10%. Research by Emmanuel Saez has shown that between …

Ludwig von Mises 200 years ago, before the advance of capitalism, a person's social status was the same from the beginning to the end of his life; he inherited it from his ancestors and never changed it. If a person was born poor, he always remained poor, and if …

Many naive observers of the market economy dismiss concern for the “bottom line” as a purely accidental social custom. To these critics, it seems absurd that a factory producing, say, drugs or toddler shoes would stop where the owner judges that profit is maximized.

Today we truly live in the Age of Statistics. In a country and an era in which statistics are revered as “scientific” and as offering the key to all knowledge, and in which vast amounts of data of all kinds and forms are showered upon us. Most of it from the government.

In a popular blog post from 2009, Greg Mankiw – author of one of the most popular economics textbooks – outlined the topics on which the vast majority of economists in the world agree. Here is his list, and we have tried to divide them into those on which we also agree …