mercantilism

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.

Too many of us who are enthusiastic about space exploration and colonization expect the federal government to lead the way. We should learn from the founding of British colonies in America.

In the middle decades of the eighteenth century two schools of thought emerged, one in France and the other in Great Britain that were critical of Mercantilism, the government system of economic planning and regulation in the 1700s.

The Feudal System had resulted in the disintegration of the unity that much of Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe had known under the Roman Empire.

The subject of tax inversion, in which American firms avail of lower tax rates in foreign countries by merging companies in those countries, has become very topical in the last couple weeks thanks to a decision by Abbvie, a drug company, to merger with Shire, an Ireland-based firm and move its headquarters overseas. One of at least 47 tax inversions in the last decade, the Abbvie-Shire deal is the largest such action yet, worth $54 billion. Perhaps unsurprisingly, President Obama and Democrats in Congress have become apoplectic with rage at the audacity of a business making a prudent decision to escape bloodsucking taxes.

The only way to permanently rid a society of a ‘gap’ in either wealth or income is by making everybody equally poor. If nobody has any more wealth than anybody else, then nobody can be ‘wealthy.’