In the clip below, Austrian economist Jeffrey Tucker, founder of Laissez Faire books, talks with Russia Today’s Lauren Lyster. A number of free-market related topics are discussed, including: central banks, minimum wages, and interest rates. Worth a watch:
From the creator of Quantitative Easing Explained (which just reached 5 million views on Youtube) Omid Malekan.
And here’s QE Explained, for those who haven’t seen it yet:
In the passage below Frédéric Bastiat comments on a few of the problems experienced in crony capitalistic societies such as ours:
But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.
Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law — which may be an isolated case — is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system.
The person who profits from this law will complain bitterly, defending his acquired rights. He will claim that the state is obligated to protect and encourage his particular industry; that this procedure enriches the state because the protected industry is thus able to spend more and to pay higher wages to the poor workingmen.
Do not listen to this sophistry by vested interests. The acceptance of these arguments will build legal plunder into a whole system. In fact, this has already occurred. The present-day delusion is an attempt to enrich everyone at the expense of everyone else; to make plunder universal under the pretense of organizing it.
Connecting the dots from 1850, when Bastiat wrote this, to today, hardly seems necessary. 162 years later, and Bastiat’s The Law is fresh as a daisy.
