Interventionism

The textbook model of "perfect competition" bans advertising, price cuts, and better products—the very things we mean by competing. Tate Fegley on why the mainstream picture of monopoly is upside down.

Ryan McMaken, Timothy Terrell, Charles Sauer, and Robert Murphy take questions from the audience on healthcare economics, free market alternatives, and the prospects for reform.

Bob Murphy makes the case that American healthcare's dysfunction is not a market failure but a pricing failure manufactured by government. He closes with practical reform proposals designed to restore market signals without waiting for Washington.

Charles Sauer profiles four healthcare entrepreneurs who built functioning free-market alternatives to the broken hospital system before turning to Washington to explain why Capitol Hill is not the solution, walking through the government-created distortions that sustain the status quo.

Timothy Terrell traces the historical origins of the American healthcare cartel, beginning with Ronald Hamowy's 1979 article documenting how the AMA used state licensing laws not to protect patients but to restrict physician supply and raise incomes.

The essay added later to the collection: a critique of proposals to nationalize banking and credit, weighing bureaucratic against profit management and warning of credit overexpansion and immobilization.

Mises’s focused analysis of price controls: why fixing prices produces shortages and demands for still more controls, and what that reveals for the theory of social organization as a whole.

Mises examines the doctrine of a “hampered” or regulated market as a distinct third system and answers Schmalenbach’s thesis that free enterprise was giving way to a bound economy.

The central essay: interventionism as a supposed economic system, the real nature of intervention, and how price ceilings, minimum wages, and similar measures defeat their own aims—leaving only a choice between the free market and socialism.

Mises’s 1929 preface, written in Vienna for the original German edition, presenting the essays as a sustained critique of interventionism, then the reigning economic policy across Europe and America.