Economics

Cutting Government Would Boost Economy

by Sheldon Richman March 7, 2013

Budget sequestration is as modest a step toward cutting Leviathan as one can imagine. Further progress will be difficult as long as people believe that slashing the size of government conflicts with reviving the economy. Nothing could be further from the truth. In his recent debate on Charlie Rose, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul ...

The Minimum Wage Harms the Most Vulnerable

by Sheldon Richman February 27, 2013

Crocodile tears are flowing again for low-income people. In his State of the Union address, President Obama proposed raising the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9 an hour. A debate is shaping up between those who support the proposal and those who favor keeping the wage where it is today. But there are good grounds — for the sake ...

TGIF: What Support for the Minimum Wage Reveals

by Sheldon Richman February 22, 2013

Economic law is not suppressed by legislated law. — Armen Alchian Few people really understand what the great economist Armen Alchian, who died the other day at age 98, put so plainly. Considering that in the recent past over a quarter of polled economists said they saw no harm in raising the minimum wage, ...

TGIF: Mind Your Metaphors

by Sheldon Richman February 15, 2013

Metaphor consists in giving a thing a name that belongs to something else. — Aristotle, Poetics Language is metaphorical through and through. — Thomas Szasz, Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences In a lecture delivered at the London School of Economics in March 1933, F.A. Hayek, a 33-year-old economist recently appointed to the faculty, lamented that the “oldest and most general ...

The Calling: The Everyday Marvels of the Market

by Steven Horwitz February 14, 2013

Those of us who live in largely market-based economies can too easily take for granted what we might call the everyday marvels of the market. We find ourselves with things that would have amazed and mystified people just a couple of generations ago. If we think of the marvels the market delivers, we normally think of technology, but fancy ...

TGIF: Does the Market Exhibit Cooperation?

by Sheldon Richman February 8, 2013

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the verb cooperate as “To work or act together toward a common end or purpose” and “To form an association for common, usually economic, benefit.” Note that these definitions seem to require awareness about some joint effort to achieve a common objective. This would seem to leave little room for the social cooperation that libertarians ...

Religious Obstacles to Democratization in the Middle East: Past and Present

by Timur Kuran February 8, 2013

On February 5th, 2013, Timur Kuran gave the following speech at The Future of Freedom Foundation’s “Economic Liberty Lecture Series.” The speech can viewed above in its entirety.  

The Calling: “Who Gets What” Is Only Half the Problem

by Steven Horwitz February 7, 2013

When we economists talk about the role of prices in a market economy, one of the points we often make is that prices determine who, among the many who would like to have a particular good, are actually able to obtain it. In other words, we must decide “who gets what.” In a world of scarcity, the wants of human ...

TGIF: Economy or Catallaxy?

by Sheldon Richman February 1, 2013

That the champions of the free market have always understood it, first and foremost, as the most basic form of social cooperation is evidenced by a dissatisfaction with the term economy itself. In volume 2 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty, F.A. Hayek claimed that we cannot properly comprehend the market order unless we free ourselves of the misleading ...

New Deal Utopianism

by George Leef February 1, 2013

Back to the Land: Arthurdale, FDR’s New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning by C.J. Maloney (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2011), 292 pages. Drive south from Morgantown, West Virginia, and you soon come to the little town of Arthurdale. At the outskirts of town, there is a roadside plaque informing those who stop to read it that Arthurdale was ...

The Calling: The Importance of Assuming Self-Interested Politicians

by Steven Horwitz January 17, 2013

With the death last week of Nobel laureate economist James Buchanan, the freedom movement has lost one of its most important thinkers. Unfortunately, Buchanan’s work often gets boiled down to the seemingly trivial observation that politicians are self-interested. Put that way, it’s too easy for people to respond, “Everyone knows that!” Although it’s true that the assumption of self-interested politicians ...

TGIF: James M. Buchanan and Spontaneous Order

by Sheldon Richman January 11, 2013

On Wednesday, Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan of George Mason University died at the age of 93. Best known for his pioneering work in Public Choice — or “politics without romance,” as he described it — and constitutional economics as a way to limit government power, he also made important contributions to subjectivist economics. His ...