free-markets

Files related to free market theory, market efficiency, and the price mechanism.

• Market Efficiency and Human Limits
• Value and Profit
• The Limits of Utopia
• Externalities: Fact-Check of the Decomposition Thesis
• Andrew Wilson vs Objectivism: Stance Dependence
• Press Freedom and Governance
• Business Cycles
• Inflation
• LLMs as Praxeological Actors
• Measuring Growth — Net Worth vs Transactions
• Capitalism vs Socialism: Which Is the Moral System? (1984) — Peikoff/Ridpath vs Vickers/Caplan; Objectivist foundationalism vs pragmatic democratic socialism
• Wickard v. Filburn — The Decision That Ate the Enumerated Powers — the AAA as a government cartel enforcing scarcity; punishing self-sufficiency; the Misesian interventionist ratchet ratified by the Court
• Accounting Identities as Domain-Matching, Not Behavioral Models — Macroeconomic identities like GDP = C+I+G+X−M and MV = PT look like equations with independent terms that can be moved around to predict policy outcomes.
• Civilizational Cycles — Thirteen thinkers across three camps describing the same meta-pattern.
• Economic Theorists — Hayek, Sowell, Schumpeter, Kondratiev — those whose work on markets, knowledge, and incentives illuminates why the cycle mechanisms operate.
• Lyn Alden on Long-Term Trade Deficit Unsustainability — A Vault Framework Engagement — Lyn Alden’s trade deficit analysis makes a careful, multi-level argument for the unsustainability of long-term trade deficits — operat…
• The Productivity–Pay Gap — “workers aren’t paid for what they produce” is an accounting identity misread as a finding about desert; the chart cannot address the question it’s deployed for. Rising dispersion is real, largely skill-biased, and concentrated in the top half.
• Poverty in America Is a Sign of Exploitation (prep) — concede the extraction, reassign the defendant: the real American rents (zoning, licensing, IP, prison labor, forfeiture) are granted by law, not earned in a market.
• The Coconut Island and the Manufactured Option Space — Two related debate moves used to force “exploitation under capitalism” or “structural conflict” conclusions.
• The GDP-Identity Tariff Fallacy — The popular argument “tariffs raise GDP because they close the trade gap (GDP = C+I+G+X−M, so reducing M raises GDP)” treats an accounting identity as a behavioral model.
• Freitas & Christian — “JD Vance’s Dollar Bombshell” (reserve currency) — Hayekian knowledge-problem rejoinder to Vance’s Christian guardrails argument (if not Christian guardrails, then government guardrails — and no planner has the knowledge); Friedman would share the diagnosis, locate the cause in fiat. discussion: pending