“Unfettered capitalism” creates a “dog-eat-dog” world in which the strong profit at the expense of the weak, everyone only looks out for their own interests, and society becomes selfish, atomized, and less human, with its members caring only about making money, not about each other.

So goes the standard mainstream view of a free society, and free markets. If you went to a government school, you heard some version of this.

Economist Guido Hulsmann has a new book out that tears this caricature to shreds. In Abundance, Generosity, and the State: An Inquiry into Economic Principles, Dr. Hulsmann systematically demonstrates the ways in which people naturally tend to help each other and to produce goods and services that do not directly benefit them in any material way.

He then shows us how government intervention works to stifle and even squash much of this activity – from government control in money and banking encouraging irresponsible financial behavior and discouraging voluntary donations (if you take nothing else from this interview, be sure to take note of the “saturation mechanism” and what happens to it in an interventionist system), to the tragic outcomes of the welfare state. 

Dr. Hulsmann turns the standard caricature on its head, and shows us in painstaking detail, how it is not freedom, but coercive interventions in the lives of free people that work to create a society of self-centered and atomized individuals.

Dr Hülsmann is a professor of economics at the University of Angers in France. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Mises Institute and a corresponding member of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

His website is here.

And his book, Abundance, Generosity, and the State: An Inquiry into Economic Principles, is here.

The book he mentions, The Welfare State We’re In, by James Bartholomew, can be found here.