WWII

Dr. Gary Wolfram, director of the economics program and professor of political economy at Hillsdale College, discusses how the federal government’s manipulation of the insurance market started as an unintended consequence of a labor policy created during World War II.

In a free-market economy, people have healthy incentives to work and save, to form businesses and invest, to explore, innovate and invent, in these and other ways “to truck and barter.” The incessant desire of man to do better, whether through profit or achievement or goodness, when governed by the rule of law, leads to a progressive society.

For millions of Americans the Second Amendment and its guarantee of the right of the individual to bear arms appears irrelevant and practically anachronistic. It seems a throwback to those earlier days of the Wild West, when many men, far from the law and order provided by the town sheriff and circuit judge, had to protect their families and land from cattle rustlers and outlaw bands. Such people are wrong.

From long before the rise of Mao’s communism — and to this day — Shanghai remains a commercial and industrial center built on the principles of laissez-faire capitalism.

No intellectual movement speaks truth to power better than libertarianism.