Free Republic

Some people hate me because I defend free markets. Once someone accosted me on a New York City street and said, "I hope you die soon." Why the hostility to commerce? What could be more benign than the freedom to trade with whomever you wish? I suspect ignorance about economics leads many to believe that when two people exchange goods and money, one wins and the other loses. If rich capitalists profit, the poor and the weak suffer. That's a myth. How many times have you paid $1 for a cup of coffee and after the clerk said, "thank you,"...

The Challenge of Liberty: Classical Liberalism Today, edited by Robert Higgs and Carl P. Close, Oakland, Calif.: Independent Institute, 422 pages $19.95 It has been just 17 years since the Berlin Wall fell. It has also been 17 years since the socialist economist Robert Heilbroner proclaimed that “the contest between capitalism and socialism is over: capitalism has won.…Capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism.” And it has been only a little more than a decade since Bill Clinton declared “the era of big government is over.” Classical liberalism—the liberalism, that is, of the 18th and 19th...

Every well-traveled cosmop­olite knows that America is mind-numbingly monotonous—the most boring country to tour, because everywhere looks like everywhere else,” as the columnist Thomas Friedman once told Charlie Rose. Boston has the same stores as Denver, which has the same stores as Charlotte or Seattle or Chicago. We live in a “Stepford world,” says Rachel Dresbeck, the author of Insiders’ Guide to Portland, Oregon. Even Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, she complains, is “dominated by the Gap, Anthropologie, Starbucks, and all the other usual suspects. Why go anywhere? Every place looks the same.” This complaint is more than the old worry,...

What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself. --- To summarize, deficits are bad--but not because they necessarily raise interest rates. They are bad because they encourage political irresponsibility. They enable our representatives in Washington to buy votes at our expense without having to...

BREAKING NEWS: Economist Milton Friedman has died. Full story to follow shortly.

In my recent National Review Online article on the Republicans's loss and what it means, I brought up two relatively new notions: one is that today's Democrats are the real conservatives of our time--New Age Conservatives who want to preserve what there is to conserve today in American politics: "a high-taxing, high-spending welfare state; a political system in which incumbents have all the advantages; a flood of illegal immigration; increasing state-level socialism; a public education system that appears deliberately designed to keep people ignorant; the worst, most libertine aspects of the Sexual Revolution; a health-care system that is increasingly under...

The problem with liberalism National Post: Letters To The Editor Tuesday, October 10, 2006 Re: Statism Isn't Liberalism, George Jonas, Oct. 7. George Jonas's column should be required reading for all Canadians, especially for those running for the Liberal party's leadership. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote, "Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from life what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the power of government to do good." Too many of today's liberals, small-l or large-L, have no real understanding of liberalism. Politically, they engaged with the Liberal party because...

Whether it takes a shoehorn or a crowbar, the Mainstream Media have decided that all Iraq reporting must be squeezed into the Vietnam template. Thus the immediate link, before we had any facts, between Haditha and My Lai. But Christopher Hitchens is having none of it. "All the glib talk about My Lai," Hitchens writes, "is so much propaganda and hot air." Indeed, any comparison between Iraq and Vietnam offends Hitchens, not because the comparison might be a slander against American troops in Iraq, but rather because it slanders the Viet Cong. For in Vietnam, unlike Iraq, according to Hitchens,...

AMSTERDAM - For centuries the Netherlands has been considered the world's most tolerant and liberal nation. This attitude is a byproduct of a disciplined civic society, confident enough to provide space for those with different ideas. It produced the country in which Descartes found refuge, a center of freedom of thought and of a free press in Europe. That Netherlands no longer exists. The murder of Theo van Gogh last year and the assassination of Pim Fortuyn in 2002 marked the end of the Holland of Erasmus and Spinoza. Their killings showed the cumulative effect of two forces that have...

The publication of a symposium on the question, "What is conservatism?" provides us with an opportunity to explore once again a complex of issues frequently raised in these pages—that having to do with the differences between libertarianism and conservatism. In this article, I shall not attempt to deal with all of the areas covered by these differences, nor with the essays of all twelve contributors to Meyer's symposium. Instead, I shall deal merely with certain aspects of the attempted reconciliation of the two philosophies that goes by the name of "fusionism." Frank S. Meyer and M. Stanton Evans are the...

Classical liberalism — or simply liberalism, as it was called until around the turn of the century — is the signature political philosophy of Western civilization. Hints and suggestions of the liberal idea can be found in other great cultures. But it was the distinctive society produced in Europe — and in the outposts of Europe, above all, America — that served as the seedbed of liberalism. In turn, that society was decisively shaped by the liberal movement. Decentralization and the division of power have been the hallmarks of the history of Europe. After the fall of Rome, no empire...

Rolling Back Government: Lessons from New Zealand If we look back through history, growth in government has been a modern phenomenon. Beginning in the 1850s and lasting until the 1920s or ’30s, the government’s share of GDP in most of the world’s industrialized economies was about six percent. From that period onwards – and particularly since the 1950s – we’ve seen a massive explosion in government share of GDP, in some places as much as 35-45 percent. (In the case of Sweden, of course, it reached 65 percent, and Sweden nearly self-destructed as a result. It is now starting to...

Introduction: The Definition of Classical LiberalismContemporary Liberalism consists of separate and often contradictory streams of thought springing from a common ancestry; the intellectual parent of these variants has not only endured intact, it has outlived some of its offspring and shown more intellectual stamina than others. The tenets of this parent, known as classical liberalism, have answered the needs and the challenges of over three centuries in the West. By observing its past and discovering how it responded to the dramatic historical dynamics of economic, technological, political, and social changes we may understand how classical liberalism provides a strong...

Last Sunday, November 2, Paris witnessed an unusual demonstration. A group of classical liberals, led by a fire-breathing 21-year-old college student, planted genetically modified seeds and distributed them to the all the passers-by. This happened in Champ de Mars, in front of the Porte de la Paix. This shocking demonstration is how Liberté J'Ecris Ton Nom, a group of French libertarian students, answered to the "obscurantism" of all of those who want to inhibit free inquiry and scientific research — in the name of food safety. Liberté J'Ecris Ton Nom objects to the food protectionism of the European Union, and...

The course of power ultimately changes only if there are forces present to oppose it. The Bush Administration, for example, rarely feels the rub of resistance; it is able to justify gratuitous tax breaks, snuggle up to friendly corporations, and fling environmentalism on the slag heap not least because the Democrats—cowed, confused, incoherent—too often end up speaking, when they speak at all, in the helium voice of a Warner Bros. pipsqueak. They hide, hoping that power, in the shape of a self-revealing grotesque (e.g., Trent Lott), will do all the work for them. It's a tactic of vacuous exhaustion, not...