Richard M. Ebeling

What Comes After the Coronavirus, Freedom or Despotism?

What is the underlying premise behind all of these arguments, whether focused on the immediate coronavirus crisis or looking beyond to the world after the crisis is behind us? It is that freedom does not work or does not work as effectively as the critic thinks it should if this health crisis is to be successfully grappled with.

Leaving People Alone Is the Best Way to Beat the Coronavirus

The problem is a social and medical one, and not a political one. The best methods and avenues for people as individuals and as members of groups and participants in society as a whole, to discover and apply that which would be best to deal with a pandemic of this sort is to leave it to the institutions of voluntary civil society and the competitive, profit-directed forces of supply and demand.

To Kill Markets Is the Worst Possible Plan

This whole ghastly episode could become another teaching moment in misguided and damaging government policies that markets, once again, successfully endured and survived.

Tradition and Why the Russians are Who They Are

As much as we as individuals and groups of people may try to and think we have untied ourselves from the ideas, customs and traditions of the past, to think anew and independently of what has preceded us, we can never completely uncouple ourselves from the cultural inheritance.

Liberalism Should Reject Welfare Statism

Dislike for the personality and disagreement with the policies of Donald Trump have helped to revive a seemingly dead idea: socialism. This has placed friends and defenders of a free society on the defensive in having to make the positive case for free market liberalism.

The Technocrats Will Not Save Us

Besides the certainty, as they say, of death and taxes, one other highly likely event will be an end to the general “good times” of relatively low price inflation and […]

Happy 90th Birthday, Professor Israel Kirzner!

Even in an era when modern medicine and technologies are adding to people’s lifetimes, along with the gains in general human economic betterment, it still stands as a notable event […]

The New Totalitarians

Like their Marxian and Nazi forbearers, these new totalitarians look at the world with a fanatical self-righteousness that they have the clear and correct vision of the “true” bases of society’s ills and the only answer for its healing.

The Mixed Economy Is a Mess

Election years tend to polarize people’s views about political parties, proposed social and economic policies, and the candidates running for high governmental office. This presidential election cycle is not only […]