The theory of interventionism argues that government interventions are inherently destabilizing, which in turn helps explain the growth of government. I argue that the theory of interventionism is also useful for explaining the process of economic growth. At first, an intervention reduces living...

It is a little-known fact that Canada adopted its own antitrust laws one year before the landmark Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The Anti-Combines Act of 1889 was adopted after a decade in which ‘combines’ (the Canadian equivalent of ‘trusts’) grew more numerous. From their numbers,...

We argue that the system of seigneurial tenure used in the province of Quebec until the mid-nineteenth century -- a system which allowed significant market power in the establishment of plants, factories and mills, combined with restrictions on the mobility of the labor force within each...

Economic freedom is robustly associated with income growth, but does this association extend to the poorest in a society? In this paper, we employ Canada’s longitudinal cohorts of income mobility between 1982 and 2018 to answer this question. We find that economic freedom, as measured by the...

To what extent are the outcomes of economic regulation intended and desired by its proponents? To address this question, we combine Stigler’s theory of regulatory capture with the Austrian theory of the dynamics of interventionism. We reframe Stigler’s theory of regulatory capture as an...