“How should prices be determined?” To this question we could make a short and simple answer: prices should be determined by the market. The answer is correct enough, but some elaboration is necessary to answer the practical problem concerning the wisdom of government price control. Let us begin on the elementary level and say that prices are
From the Buffett Rule to France’s 75 percent tax on the wealthy, “soaking the rich” is all the rage once again. Henry Hazlitt, writing his Business Tides column for Newseek, challenged this perennial impulse in the following three articles from the postwar era. Note Hazlitt’s “Laffer curve” analysis, written when Arthur Laffer was in primary
A correspondent who describes himself as “a 26-year old college graduate who strongly supports a system of free enterprise,” recently wrote me to say that he is “continuously confronted with questions that are most difficult to answer.” He appended a list of 10 of them, and asked for my comments. I offer my answer here. To save space, I have not
[Published January 27, 1964 in Newsweek. Excerpted from Business Tides: The Newsweek Era of Henry Hazlitt ] President Johnson has declared an “all-out war on human poverty.” It is a laudable aim. It has, in fact, been the aim of rulers, statesmen, economists, reformers, religious leaders — of every man of goodwill — from time immemorial. It is
There are basically only two ways in which economic life can be organized. The first is by the voluntary choice of families and individuals and by voluntary cooperation. This arrangement has come to be known as the free market. The other is by the orders of a dictator. This is a command economy. In its more extreme form, when an organized state
What is the Mises Institute?
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.