The market solves a complex information problem. The economist who emphasizes this the most is Hayek. He (and Mises) made the point that no central planner can acquire the information needed to adjust resources to meet economic needs.

The information problem includes making sure that your grocery store has enough milk but not too much. However, it also includes allocating long-term investment between, say, pharmaceutical research and new microbreweries.

As a follower of Hayek, I believe that government will do a poor job at solving this information problem. However, that does not mean that I think that markets will do a perfect job of solving this information problem. A tiresome rhetorical tactic of anti-free-market economists is to say that when markets fail to solve information problems this discredits markets.

Why are you so bitter about politics? Why so cynical? Why don't you give candidates and office holders the benefit of the doubt when they say they want to help others?

I am a lead pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write.
This is a classic "story" which reveals the basis of capitalism: co-operation.

If men were like ants, there would be no interest in human freedom.

It is the fact of each person's uniqueness — the fact that no two people can be wholly interchangeable — that makes each and every man irreplaceable and that makes us care whether he lives or dies, whether he is happy or oppressed.

No one can fully develop his powers in any direction without engaging in specialization.

While a continuing and advancing division of labor is needed for a developed economy and society, the extent of such development at any given time limits the degree of specialization that any given economy can have.

If freedom and the growth of the market are each important for the development of each individual and, therefore, to the flowering of diversity and individual differences, then so is there a casual connection between freedom and economic growth.

To Marx, this phenomenon of the market and the division of labor was a radical evil, for it meant that no one consumed any of his own product.

The call of "equality" is a siren song that can only mean the destruction of all that we cherish as being human.

Thus, only the specific of equality of liberty — the older view of human equality — is compatible with the basic nature of man. Equality of condition would reduce humanity to an antheap existence.

If, then, inequality of income is the inevitable corollary of freedom, then so too is inequality of control.

In Jeffersonian terminology, we will discover "natural aristocracies" who will rise to prominence and leadership in every field. The point is to allow the rise of these natural aristocracies, but not the rule of "artificial aristocracies" — those who rule by means of coercion.

This wide ranging essay hits lots of subjects of permanent and contemporary interest.

Does the wrangling of interest groups corrupt politics—or constitute it?

A new theory of the leisure class

Who cares?

CEO pay just isn't a huge problem.

The former Jane examined CEO pay.