Donald J. Boudreaux

Trade Agreements are Better than Protectionism

My ideal is for each government to immediately abolish all tariffs and other trade restrictions, regardless of what any other government does or doesn’t do. That is, I fully support a policy of unilateral free trade.

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Eight Questions We Should Be Asking about Economics

We rely on competitive markets to supply us with “correct” quantities of goods and services ranging in importance from chewing gum to industrial chemicals, and from pedicures to petroleum. So why do we not rely on competitive markets to supply us with the “correct” quantity of money?

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In Praise of Carbon Fuels

Carbon-based fuels have powered modern economic growth – growth which is, by far, history’s greatest benefactor of humanity.

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Straightforward Facts About the American Economy

The American economy will continue to improve only if markets are left sufficiently free to overwhelm the innumerable obstructions, diktats, and other burdens that governments, at all levels, inflict on us as we attempt to peacefully pursue our commercial and household affairs.

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Trade’s Costs Are Not Losses

But because no one in a market economy is entitled to his or her particular source of income, whenever competition obliges producers to adjust to the demands of consumers, producers — while paying the costs of participating in a market economy — suffer nothing that ought to be described as losses.

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Trade Has No Losers

Saying that trade has losers suggests that stopping trade would eliminate such losses. Wrong. 

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The Glory of Manhattan

Four million people, nearly all strangers to each other, are hurrying about to work and play, and doing so in ways that are remarkably orderly and productive — and all, of course, absent any overall design or direction.

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How Self Interest Builds Prosperity and Community

Markets guided by prices daily lead each of us to share happily and abundantly with each other despite the reality that we are, to each other, mostly strangers. Familiarity, affection, and brotherly love are virtuous feelings but these feelings do not contribute as reliably to our material well being as does market exchange.

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