In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority. Proponents of the free market as a normative ideal contrast it with a regulated market, in which a government intervenes in supply and demand by means of various methods such as taxes or regulations. In an idealized free market economy, prices for goods and services are set solely by the bids and offers of the participants.
Thorstein Bunde Veblen was a Norwegian-American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism.
Scott Nearing was an American radical economist, educator, writer, political activist, pacifist, vegetarian and advocate of simple living.
Paul Marlor Sweezy was a Marxist economist, political activist, publisher, and founding editor of the long-running magazine Monthly Review. He is best remembered for his contributions to economic theory as one of the leading Marxian economists of the second half of the 20th century.
Oskar Ryszard Lange was a Polish economist and diplomat. He is best known for advocating the use of market pricing tools in socialist systems and providing a model of market socialism. He responded to the economic calculation problem proposed by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek by claiming that managers in a centrally-planned economy would be able to monitor supply and demand through increases and declines in inventories of goods, and advocated the nationalization of major industries. During his stay in the United States, Lange was an academic teacher and researcher in mathematical economics. Later in socialist Poland, he was a member of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers' Party.
John Rogers Commons was an American institutional economist, Georgist, progressive and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
John Bates Clark was an American neoclassical economist. He was one of the pioneers of the marginalist revolution and opponent to the Institutionalist school of economics, and spent most of his career as professor at Columbia University.
John Spargo was a British political writer who, later in life, became an expert in the history and crafts of Vermont. At first Spargo was active in the Socialist Party of America. A Methodist preacher he tried to meld the Protestant Social Gospel with Marxist socialism in Marxian Socialism and Religion: A Study of the Relation of the Marxian Theories to the Fundamental Principles of Religion (1915). He also founded a settlement house in Yonkers, N.Y. Spargo moved steadily to the right after 1917 when he supported American intervention in World War I. With AFL leader Samuel Gompers he organized the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy in 1917. Spargo helped draft the Colby Note that formalised the Wilson administration's anti-communist policies. He strongly denounced the Bolshevik Revolution in Bolshevism: The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy (1919). He opposed the foreign policy of the New Deal, especially its recognition of the USSR in 1933. He supported the House Un-American Activities Committee in the late 1930s and Senator Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s. He endorsed Barry Goldwater In the 1964 Elections.
The Rand School of Social Science was formed in 1906 in New York City by adherents of the Socialist Party of America. The school aimed to provide a broad education to workers, imparting a politicizing class-consciousness, and additionally served as a research bureau, a publisher, and the operator of a summer camp for socialist and trade union activists.
James R. Otteson is an American philosopher and political economist. He is the John T. Ryan Jr. Professor of Business Ethics at the University of Notre Dame. Formerly, he was the Thomas W. Smith Presidential Chair in Business Ethics, Professor of Economics, and executive director of the Eudaimonia Institute at Wake Forest University. He is also a Senior Scholar at The Fund for American Studies in Washington, D.C., a Research Professor in the Center for the Philosophy of Freedom and in the Philosophy Department at the University of Arizona, a Visitor of Ralston College, a Research Fellow for the Independent Institute in California, a director of Ethics and Economics Education of New England, and a Senior Scholar at the Fraser Institute. He has taught previously at Yeshiva University, New York University, Georgetown University, and the University of Alabama.
John Maurice Clark (1884–1963) was an American economist whose work combined the rigor of traditional economic analysis with an "institutionalist" attitude. Clark was a pioneer in developing the notion of workable competition and the theoretical basis of modern Keynesian economics, including the concept of the economic multiplier.
Selig Perlman was an economist and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal-democratic polity and a capitalist-oriented mixed economy. The protocols and norms used to accomplish this involve a commitment to representative and participatory democracy, measures for income redistribution, regulation of the economy in the general interest, and social welfare provisions. Due to longstanding governance by social democratic parties during the post-war consensus and their influence on socioeconomic policy in Northern and Western Europe, social democracy became associated with Keynesianism, the Nordic model, the social-liberal paradigm, and welfare states within political circles in the late 20th century. It has been described as the most common form of Western or modern socialism, as well as the reformist wing of democratic socialism.
John Augustine Ryan (1869–1945) was an American Catholic priest who was a noted moral theologian and advocate of social justice. Ryan lived during a decisive moment in the development of Catholic social teaching within the United States. The largest influx of immigrants in America's history, the emancipation of American slaves, and the industrial revolution had produced a new social climate in the early twentieth century, and the Catholic Church faced increasing pressure to take a stance on questions of social reform.
Harry Wellington Laidler was an American socialist writer, magazine editor, and politician. He is best remembered as Executive Director of the League for Industrial Democracy, successor to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and for his close political association with perennial Socialist Party Presidential nominee Norman Thomas. He also served a two-year term on the New York City Council.
George D. Herron was an American clergyman, lecturer, writer and Christian socialist activist.
The Richard T. Ely House is a Georgian Revival-style house built in 1896 in Madison, Wisconsin - designed by Charles Sumner Frost for Richard T. Ely, a prominent economics professor. In 1974 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. It is located within the University Heights Historic District.
Duncan K. Foley is an American economist. He is the Leo Model Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Previously, he was Associate Professor of Economics at MIT and Stanford, and Professor of Economics at Columbia University. He has held visiting professorships at Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, UC Berkeley, and Dartmouth College, as well as the New School for Social Research.
Market socialism is a type of economic system involving the public, cooperative, or social ownership of the means of production in the framework of a market economy, or one that contains a mix of worker-owned, nationalized, and privately owned enterprises. The central idea is that, as in capitalism, businesses compete for profits, however they will be "owned, or at least governed," by those who work in them. Market socialism differs from non-market socialism in that the market mechanism is utilized for the allocation of capital goods and the means of production. Depending on the specific model of market socialism, profits generated by socially owned firms may variously be used to directly remunerate employees, accrue to society at large as the source of public finance, or be distributed amongst the population in a social dividend.
John Graham Brooks was an American sociologist, political reformer, and author. A former Unitarian minister, Brooks resigned from the ministry in 1891 and became an academic specialist in the field of labor relations. A prominent lecturer and public intellectual, Brooks rejected the doctrine of socialism, instead advocating for the regulation of predatory monopolies and the initiation of progressive social reform legislation to ameliorate the most glaring problems suffered by the working class.
