Stefan Bartl: Liberty Creates Abundance - How Free Markets Feed Families

Thanksgiving draws people, regardless of race or creed, together around a table heavy with food and laughter. At its center sits a golden turkey, but it’s the sides (mashed potatoes, green beans, stuffing, and gravy) that spark the most excitement. American football murmurs from the television as plates and hands cross the table, passing dishes with the casual choreography of family life.

This is, in spirit, the very scene Frédéric Bastiat once imagined when he marveled at how Paris was fed each morning. “It staggers the imagination,” he wrote, “to comprehend the vast multiplicity of objects that must pass through its gates tomorrow… And yet all are sleeping peacefully at this moment.” No single mind coordinates the miracle and yet, it happens.

David R. Henderson: Free Markets Are Monopoly Busters

Competition does the work that regulators can’t—especially in a technological age.

In January 1969, two months after I had turned eighteen, I read that the last official act of Lyndon Johnson’s administration was to bring an antitrust suit against IBM for monopolizing the market for mainframe computers. I was angry. You might wonder why. Was it because the lawsuit would waste resources of both IBM and taxpayers? It did do that, but my anger was more fundamental. IBM had worked hard for its position, and it seemed to me that it was being punished for succeeding and for producing something that companies wanted to buy. “No one gets fired for buying IBM” was a well-known slogan at the time.

Roger Partridge: Trump’s Principle-Free Conservatives

As chairman of a business-funded think tank, I have been called many things — neoliberal, libertarian, right-wing, and even (indirectly) one of “Hayek’s Bastards.” But never left-wing. And certainly not “left of Jacinda Ardern.” That is, until I started writing about Donald Trump. Suddenly, people who once nodded along with my commitment to the rule of law, institutional checks and balances, and policymaking that respects facts over fiat began treating me as if I’d joined the radical left. All for pointing out what seemed self-evident: that Trump’s governance style poses a threat to constitutional democracy, freedom and prosperity.

Soham Patil: Why do we work?

Socialists are obsessed with eliminating the need to work. They contend that it amounts to coercion that is oppressive. However, they fail to understand the implications of what it means to choose to work and why working is a necessary part of life.

Working in the context of a job refers to exchanging labor for money. Most jobs work on a voluntary basis where an employer and employee agree upon the nature of the work and wages to be paid. Such an agreement is found because an employer realizes he values the labor of the employee more than the wages he must pay, while the employee realizes he values his wages more than the amount of work he must contribute to his job. When these conditions are satisfied, a job is created, and work occurs in exchange for monetary compensation.