The great revolution of the market economy is not that it makes some people very rich. It is that it makes ordinary exchange—the millions of small transactions that occur daily—vehicles for peaceful cooperation and mutual improvement. Every time a merchant sells to a customer, a worker accepts employment, a farmer brings goods to market, an artisan creates something for distant buyers; these are acts of peace. They are transactions between people who have found it more profitable to cooperate than to conflict. In an age of rising tensions and declining faith in institutions, this message is urgent. We must recover the understanding that economics is fundamentally about peace, about how billions of strangers can coordinate their actions, satisfy each other’s needs, and improve their conditions together. When we grasp this, we realize that defending markets is not about defending greed or selfishness. It is about defending the greatest engine of peaceful cooperation humanity has ever known. View quoted note →

Markets thus accomplish what diplomacy, treaties, and moral exhortation cannot: they make cooperation more profitable than conflict. They do not require that we love our neighbors or share their values, they simply align incentives. When I profit from your prosperity, I have reason to wish you well. When your poverty impoverishes me, I have reason to help you escape it. These incentives are far more reliable than appeals to universal brotherhood. View quoted note →

The Architecture of Peace: How Markets Transform Conflict into Cooperation My latest piece with Mises https://mises.org/mises-wire/architecture-peace-how-markets-transform-conflict-cooperation

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of the voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved