Ebeling lived on AIER’s campus from 2008 to 2009.
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-a6cf4449-7fff-f9a1-68e3-a8c4c4482976">Free market liberalism not only has brought about growing prosperity for more of humanity, but has cultivated a more polite and respectful society to accompany the material betterment of the human condition. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-7429c491-7fff-d5db-d1bd-7842e61c8965">If the classical liberals of that earlier time could defeat the prevailing beliefs and vested interests supporting human slavery, after its existence for all of human history, some of us believe the same can be done against the existing system of collectivism, interventionism, and welfare statism in both their authoritarian and democratic forms. </span></p>
<p><span id="docs-internal-guid-99779579-7fff-efec-b305-4bb622c55e8a">"A crucial reason why monetary and fiscal planners fail traces to the indicators they use as the signposts for what they may need to do are themselves false signals hiding from view the reality of the complex market system." ~ Richard Ebeling </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-42fedc9c-7fff-a398-ad03-9b0d861a749e">Under a regime of democratic socialism, for an individual to have the opportunity for any such changes in many aspects of life, it would be necessary for him to change enough other minds that the next time voting is held on these issues, new decisions would be made about these everyday matters. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d44f4ed3-7fff-d82a-3d3f-0e83377201d3">Should it be the business of any central bank to be targeting or setting interest rates, or should this be the business of the market forces of supply and demand, as with any other price in the economy?</span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-3ff3480f-7fff-1784-b463-5c1310ff4b06">The Chinese government’s insistence on “making China great again” through various forms of command and control (at home and abroad) suggests that things are not likely to work out according to plan. </span></p>
<p>Eighty years after a remarkable colloquium in 1938, one that tried to assess the crisis of liberalism and what to do about it, the proceedings have finally been published. The results are tremendously revealing. The Walter Lippman Colloquium was indeed a seminal event that set the stage for the postwar liberal revival. </p>
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<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-f25a3104-1068-f7a0-f994-e9948cecc960">Serious fiscal crises are coming in the years ahead for the “entitlement” state. The long-run consequences of a host of short-run policies that have accumulated over the many decades are finally facing the American people just over the political horizon. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-d28a3c6a-f071-74e1-6730-ca232d70d12c">All forms of government intervention — taxation and regulation — within a market economy are forms of government planning. </span></p>
<p dir="ltr"><span id="docs-internal-guid-9a4a5c33-c822-7519-2e26-da300c05e5e9">Fifty years ago, in 1968, Austrian (and Austrian school) economist Friedrich A. Hayek published a monograph called </span><a href="https://iea.org.uk/publications/research/the-confusion-of-language-in-political-thought">The Confusion of Language in Political Thought</a>. Hayek argued that the words we use and the meanings we give to them greatly influence how we think about the political system and the wider social order in which we live. This is no less so, I would suggest, in the language and the meanings of words used in economics.</p>
