Thanks to Dr. Shawn Ritenour for sharing this article by the Acton Institute’s Samuel Gregg, published by The American Spectator. “Crony capitalism is about hollowing-out market economies and replacing them with what may be described as political markets. In political markets, the focus is no longer upon prospering through creating, refining, and offering products and […]
Read MoreOk, so these aren’t actually about Piketty. But I came across a few selections tonight reading through Jesus Huerta de Soto’s Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles that are very relevant in light of recent discussions about Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century and his r>g theory. The first is from Bohm-Bawerk: “There […]
Read MoreMatt Ridley has a great column in today’s Wall Street Journal combatting ecologists’ “carrying capacity” beliefs about earth’s resources and, by implication, political efforts to regulate resource consumption. “What frustrates [economists] is [ecologists’] tendency to think in terms of static limits. Ecologists can’t seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered, or […]
Read MoreA friend informed me of economist Peter Klein’s apt analysis of the inequality debate as it relates to Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. From Klein’s blog: Piketty and his admirers define “capital” as a homogenous, liquid pool of funds, not a heterogeneous stock of capital assets. This is not merely a terminological issue, as those familiar […]
Read MoreDavid Harsanyi published today at The Federalist: Like many progressives, Piketty doesn’t really believe most people deserve their wealth anyway, so confiscating it presents no real moral dilemma. He also argues that we can measure a person’s productivity and the value of a worker (namely, low-skilled laborers), while at the same time he argues that […]
Read MoreSandy Ikeda writing in The Freeman on April 17: “A planner can’t build an entire city (or neighborhood eve) because she can’t begin to design and construct the necessary diversity and social intricacy that happens spontaneously in a living city. And I don’t think she should even try because it can irreparably damage, even kill, […]
Read MoreArthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, has a great column in today’s New York Times. Tibetan Buddhists actually count wealth among the four factors in a happy life, along with worldly satisfaction, spirituality and enlightenment. Money per se is not evil. For the Dalai Lama, the key question is whether “we utilize our […]
Read MoreWe often hear that the American manufacturing industry is in major decline. In fact, the point often goes without saying these days, or at least without good data to back it up. That’s not to say that the number of manufacturing jobs in America hasn’t dropped off–that much is certain. But is the number of people employed in the […]
Read MoreFrom Frank Hollenbeck in today’s Mises Daily article: “We live on a planet with a constraint called gravity. We can adapt to the law of gravity by creating innovations such as airplanes, but we cannot defy the law of gravity by jumping off a building without a parachute. The same is true in economics and […]
Read MoreFrom the introduction of Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action. “It is true that economics is a theoretical science and as such abstains from any judgment of value. It is not its task to tell people what ends they should aim at. It is a science of the means to be applied for the attainment of ends […]
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