Voluntary Exchange Sources

Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is adapted from The Gold Standard: Retrospect and Prospect edited by Peter C. Earle and William J. Luther. One shortcoming of the bitcoin protocol is its limited transactions capacity. In the early stages of bitcoin’s development, Satoshi Nakamoto imposed a block...

What are we to make of Galileo Galilei? A scientific hero whose revolutionary ideas were quashed by the institutional authority of the early 17th-century church? A natural philosopher who defended Copernicus’ mathematics and astronomy valiantly but was prone to vanity and arrogance? Or even, as...

In the wake of the Afghanistan debacle, which could have been avoided with even a hint of Executive Branch foresight, President Biden needed a win. And how did he chase that much-needed win? He ordered some 80 million American citizens to get vaccinated. This he...

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, continue to cast a long shadow over American life. Twenty years later, at home and abroad, the world is more chaotic and less free because the U.S. government exploited our fear to erode our liberties and launch two...

(Don Boudreaux) TweetIn my latest column for AIER I marvel at the deep insight that economics, well-taught and well-learned, gives us into reality. A slice: But even many economists whose introduction to economics was as splendid as was my own are nevertheless reluctant to endorse laissez-faire...

Do markets make the conditions for moral action possible? To answer to this question, I will develop the normative implications of competition in the market process. As a value-free science, positive economics illustrates the economic consequences of different forms of competitive behavior for resource allocation...