free market

What You Don’t Know About Immigration Can Hurt You

"With respect to immigration, let’s allow anyone who wishes to move here with the provision that they are ineligible for tax-funded government benefits. Presto: armies of foreign-born 'net tax producers.' Keeping immigrants out will also cost us liberty as well as money. What invasions of privacy are we willing to countenance in order to prevent people from living and working here? We’re slowly and steadily crushing businesses under ever-heavier regulatory burdens. What will happen when we tell them 'here’s a new stack of immigration rules'? Immigration restrictions might be good populist politics, but they are lousy economics." Continue reading →

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The First Step to a Free Detroit: Let Them Work

"What might the ordinary people of Detroit achieve if all barriers to the free use of their labor were removed? What if taxes were eliminated, allowing workers to keep all of their pay? We could expect the early emergence of personal services, such as hairdressers, barbershops, cleaning services, home maintenance, babysitting, etc. If capital has confidence that it can be protected, then next we could expect to see small scale capital-intensive enterprises spring up, such as food vendors, private taxis, bodegas, and tobacco shops. If these are allowed to flourish, then we could expect to see larger capital intensive enterprises arise, such as small scale factories." Continue reading →

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Thai doctor: “I’m not a slave to insurance companies or regulations…”

"People often presume that the medical care in the developed West is the best in the world. But over the years, it’s become a centralized, bureaucratic mess. In Thailand, private medical care is excellent, efficient, and tremendously cost effective. Many of the international hospitals are more like five-star hotels and luxury shopping malls. And there’s very little waiting. The quality of the care is also first rate. Many of the doctors were trained at western universities and fellowships. One of the physicians I met yesterday received her MD in Singapore, plus a Masters degree and PhD in her field at a top university in California, and then another fellowship at Harvard." Continue reading →

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Hong Kong Wrong [2006]

"Though a colony of socialist Britain, Hong Kong followed a laissez-faire capitalist policy, thanks largely to a British civil servant, John Cowperthwaite. Assigned to handle Hong Kong's financial affairs in 1945, Cowperthwaite was so famously laissez-faire that he refused to collect economic statistics for fear this would only give government officials an excuse for more meddling. The results of his policy were remarkable. At the end of World War II, Hong Kong was a dirt-poor island with a per-capita income about one-quarter that of Britain's. By 1997, when sovereignty was transferred to China, its per-capita income was roughly equal to that of the departing colonial power." Continue reading →

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Mises’ Answer to Would-Be Conspirators: You Will Lose

"The heart, mind, and soul of Austrian school economics is this: the free market provides better information and better incentives to satisfy customers than any rival system can ever offer. Therefore, the free market will grow at the expense of central planning. The decentralized decisions of people with money -- decisions informed by market pricing -- will be more accurate than the centralized decisions of any committee. This is why I really do not pay a lot of attention to the Bilderberg, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission. Ultimately, they are going to lose, just as their British equivalents and predecessors lost, 1914-1945. The digital genie is out of the bottle." Continue reading →

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Competing currencies saved Zimbabwe from hyperinflationary collapse

"'At first covertly, then in openness, and finally with the consent of the government,' Mr. Noko writes, 'foreign currencies – the rand, the euro, the pound, the U.S. dollar, the [Zambian]kwacha – replaced Zimbabwe’s dollar.' Precisely as Mr. Hayek had imagined, Zimbabwe’s inflationary spiral ended. Within weeks, the country’s economy showed dramatic improvement. Businesses began to open. Banks began to function. Unemployment began to fall. GDP began to rise. Private credit began to increase. Foreign investment began to return. The human exodus ended. Thiers’ Law, the opposite principle of Gresham’s Law, does work: Good money, freely circulated, drives out bad." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingCompeting currencies saved Zimbabwe from hyperinflationary collapse

Competing currencies saved Zimbabwe from hyperinflationary collapse

"'At first covertly, then in openness, and finally with the consent of the government,' Mr. Noko writes, 'foreign currencies – the rand, the euro, the pound, the U.S. dollar, the [Zambian]kwacha – replaced Zimbabwe’s dollar.' Precisely as Mr. Hayek had imagined, Zimbabwe’s inflationary spiral ended. Within weeks, the country’s economy showed dramatic improvement. Businesses began to open. Banks began to function. Unemployment began to fall. GDP began to rise. Private credit began to increase. Foreign investment began to return. The human exodus ended. Thiers’ Law, the opposite principle of Gresham’s Law, does work: Good money, freely circulated, drives out bad." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingCompeting currencies saved Zimbabwe from hyperinflationary collapse

Competing currencies saved Zimbabwe from hyperinflationary collapse

"'At first covertly, then in openness, and finally with the consent of the government,' Mr. Noko writes, 'foreign currencies – the rand, the euro, the pound, the U.S. dollar, the [Zambian]kwacha – replaced Zimbabwe’s dollar.' Precisely as Mr. Hayek had imagined, Zimbabwe’s inflationary spiral ended. Within weeks, the country’s economy showed dramatic improvement. Businesses began to open. Banks began to function. Unemployment began to fall. GDP began to rise. Private credit began to increase. Foreign investment began to return. The human exodus ended. Thiers’ Law, the opposite principle of Gresham’s Law, does work: Good money, freely circulated, drives out bad." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingCompeting currencies saved Zimbabwe from hyperinflationary collapse

Competing currencies saved Zimbabwe from hyperinflationary collapse

"'At first covertly, then in openness, and finally with the consent of the government,' Mr. Noko writes, 'foreign currencies – the rand, the euro, the pound, the U.S. dollar, the [Zambian]kwacha – replaced Zimbabwe’s dollar.' Precisely as Mr. Hayek had imagined, Zimbabwe’s inflationary spiral ended. Within weeks, the country’s economy showed dramatic improvement. Businesses began to open. Banks began to function. Unemployment began to fall. GDP began to rise. Private credit began to increase. Foreign investment began to return. The human exodus ended. Thiers’ Law, the opposite principle of Gresham’s Law, does work: Good money, freely circulated, drives out bad." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingCompeting currencies saved Zimbabwe from hyperinflationary collapse

Tech-savvy Vietnamese coffee farmers brew global takeover

"From high-tech Israeli irrigation systems to text message updates of global prices for the commodity, coffee farming in Vietnam’s Central Highlands has come a long way since the French first introduced the bean over a century ago. By texting 'CA' to the number 8288 from any Vietnamese mobile phone, farmers almost instantly receive a message with the London prices of Robusta coffee beans and the New York price of Arabica beans. In 20 years, Vietnam went from contributing less than 0.1 per cent of world production in 1980 to some 13 per cent in 2000 – staggering growth that has been partially blamed for the collapse of global coffee prices in the 1990s. There is no tax on coffee exports." Continue reading →

Continue ReadingTech-savvy Vietnamese coffee farmers brew global takeover