Anarchism

Besides promoting free trade, Turgot argued against taxes and tariffs. Due to the reciprocal nature of trade, Turgot pointed out the absurdity of wanting only to export while not importing. Protective tariffs, set up to discourage imports, were described as war of all against all using state monopoly privilege at the expense of consumers. They led to a system of reciprocal oppression between industries and a balance of annoyance and injustice which made everyone worse off. ...

Turgot regarded industry regulation as a system of coerced cartelization and special privileges conferred by the state. Regulations effectively serve as taxes which increase costs incurred by the producers/sellers, which reduce competition and discourage innovation. Rather than protecting consumers, these regulations compel them to buy inferior products at higher prices. Economic activities involve the use of the particular knowledge in sole possession of individual market participants. It is not possible for a government or a theorist to obtain or use all such such knowledge. The owners of labor and capital are best suited to employ these factors to the most advantageous use with the help of their skills, experiences, and expectations. ...

The Question That Stumps Libertarians The libertarian, upon pointing out the excesses of the state, is confronted by the inevitable question from the statist: “Are you an anarchist?” The connotations of anarchy are such that the libertarian, if he says yes, finds himself defending ‘chaos.’ If, on the other hand, he says no, he legitimizes a degree of state intervention, and from that point, having ceded ground to the statist, he consigns himself to the defensive for the remainder of the debate. ...

In Saifedean Ammous’ podcast with Thomas Massey, Hayek is accused of being a little too socialist and his book The Road to Serfdom overrated. He is praised, however, for being diplomatic enough with the mainstream to remain relevant until winning the Swedish Central Bank Prize (the so-called Nobel Prize), and then speaking the anarchist language. The Road to Serfdom is the only book by Friedrich Hayek that I have read, and based on just that, I have to disagree with the socialist-lite characterization. The ideas he promotes are libertarian. He does not go up against the Keynesians, but then, the book was meant to target socialists, which it did. ...

Note that the law applies not just to a particular type of coins, but to the exchange rates between different money commodities as well. Suppose in a bimetallic standard, metal A is pegged to metal B at a ratio of 1:10, but the market value of a unit of metal A is 12x that of metal B. In this case, we have a price ceiling whereby metal A is artificially undervalued, and per Gresham’s Law, will be driven out of circulation. ...

Gresham’s Law is frequently oversimplified as “bad money drives good money out of circulation.” This phenomenon has been observed in history whenever debasement of coins has occurred. In such cases, people choose to collect coins with the greater precious metal content and spend the debased coins. Over time, the ‘good’ money, the coins with more precious metal in them, get driven out of circulation by ‘bad’ money, the debased coins. ...