adam smith

The competitive market economy is a powerful institutional mechanism for bringing human ingenuity, energy and creativity to bear to improve both the material and cultural circumstances of multitudes of people around the world.

This is the time to give thanks, and I hope that your family has much to be thankful for this year.  Thanksgiving offers a time to reflect on the prosperity we enjoy. 

Whatever economic freedom we enjoy in the world today is due, to a great extent, to the ideas and efforts of the classical liberals and economists of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Listening to the rhetoric coming from the Trump Administration, it would be easy to assume that America’s balance of trade deficit is causing market misery and economic harm to the people of the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth.

David Ricardo (1772-1823) was one of the most influential economic theorists of the first half of the nineteenth century.

For starters, we know it’s not astrophysics…

Adam Smith is, without doubt, the most famous member of that group of Scottish Moral Philosophers who contributed to the development of social and economic understanding of the market economy and how economic liberty makes human prosperity possible.

Not too surprisingly, for over two hundred and fifty years these ideas of Hume’s have both been highly controversial in philosophy, yet immensely influential across many social and scientific disciplines.

Ludwig von Mises’s majestic magnum opus, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, was published on September 14, 1949. In the nearly seven decades since its appearance, Human Action has come to be recognized as one of the truly great classics of modern economics.

Political campaign years are filled with candidates’ promises to solve people’s problems. Government policies will “create jobs,” will reduce or even block the “unfair” competition of market rivals in foreign lands, will restore or create prosperity for all, and will assure “fairness” for everyone, even if it means imposing regulatory or special tax burdens on some to guarantee politically provided privileges and benefits for others who are deemed “deserving.”

A recently released report on the degree of confidence that Americans have in the country’s leading political and economic institutions showed that few of these institutions are held in high regard by the public.

In my opinion, this book ranks among those written by Adam Smith, Frederick Bastiat, and Ludwig Von Mises. Understanding Contoski’s message will make a reader a more effective participant in the fight to fix our country’s flawed economic policies.

The aggressively statist, socialist government of Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro styles itself as a Bolivarian revolutionary regime for Venezuela. Named for the great 19th century South American independence hero, Simon Bolivar, the Venezuelan Bolivarian movement claims to be the fulfillment of that leader’s legacy. Yet virtually everything we know about the man and his political philosophy suggests he would be horrified by “his” revolution.