Archive for Steven Horwitz
Contributing editor Steven Horwitz is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Economics at St. Lawrence University and the author of Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: An Austrian Perspective, now in paperback.
The Snow Plowers’ Petition
Looking for the unseen effects of economic policy is the beginning of wisdom.
9Feb2012 | Steven Horwitz | 5 comments | ContinuedCreating Jobs versus Creating Value
The next time anyone starts talking about job creation, stop listening. Jobs come into existence when entrepreneurs are free to create value.
2Feb2012 | Steven Horwitz | 25 comments | ContinuedThe Problem with Privatization
If the goal is efficiency in delivering the goods, private ownership is a necessary but not a sufficient condition.
26Jan2012 | Steven Horwitz | 27 comments | ContinuedThe Limits of the Local
A global economy has room for the local, while mandatory localism cannot meet the needs of those who prefer to buy global.
19Jan2012 | Steven Horwitz | 10 comments | ContinuedNot Just What, But How
Only in a free-market economy, characterized by the private ownership of capital, could we figure out not just what to produce, but how best to produce it.
12Jan2012 | Steven Horwitz | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Tyranny of the Articulate
The real failure of deliberative democracy is that it’s a reflection of the tendency of academics to privilege their own world of reason, rhetoric, and articulate knowledge.
5Jan2012 | Steven Horwitz | 15 comments | ContinuedThere Is No Great Stagnation: Coffee Edition
The wonderful thing about markets is that firms are always trying to figure out how to deliver the things consumers want.
22Dec2011 | Steven Horwitz | 35 comments | ContinuedMr. Keynes’s Aggregates
Stimulus spending, bailouts, and extension of unemployment benefits only prevent the fundamental mechanisms of change from doing their work.
15Dec2011 | Steven Horwitz | 8 comments | ContinuedThe Failure of Market Failure
Which process has better built-in mechanisms to provide the knowledge and incentives necessary to notice imperfections and improve on them?
8Dec2011 | Steven Horwitz | 41 comments | ContinuedTwo Thoughts on Occupy Wall Street
If you want a peaceful, prosperous, and pleasant world, work to encourage commerce and limit the State.
1Dec2011 | Steven Horwitz | 37 comments | ContinuedKeynesianism Doesn’t Mean Bigger Government?
The debate over what John Maynard Keynes “really” meant by the theories he put forward in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money has been going on almost since it was published in 1936. The release of the second Hayek-Keynes hip-hop video brought this debate back to a boil. For example, in a May [...]
30Nov2011 | Steven Horwitz | 4 comments | ContinuedMarkets Are Messy, Part 2: The Errors of the Economists
The perfect-competition model assumes away the key function of actual competition, which is to discover the very things the model takes as given.
17Nov2011 | Steven Horwitz | 6 comments | ContinuedMarkets Are Messy
If we knew how markets would solve problems, we wouldn’t need them.
10Nov2011 | Steven Horwitz | 36 comments | ContinuedBankers, Not the Free Market, Bear Blame
Many of the housing policies implicated in the financial crisis were not imposed on the bankers but rather were aggressively lobbied for.
3Nov2011 | Steven Horwitz | 31 comments | ContinuedSafe Toasters and Toxic Financial Assets
If we want our financial system to be as reliable as our toasters, we need more market competition and less of the heavy hand of the State.
27Oct2011 | Steven Horwitz | 7 comments | ContinuedThe Importance of Failure
In today’s society failure has become something to fear, avoid, and therefore prevent at all costs. Whether it is unemployment compensation, farm subsidies, or bailouts for failing companies, the world seems to view failure as having no redeeming social value. If success is all good and failure is all bad, then it seems as though [...]
26Oct2011 | and Steven Horwitz | 11 comments | ContinuedRhetoric, Reality, and the Recession
Progressives seem unable to distinguish between the rhetoric of the Bush administration and its reality.
20Oct2011 | Steven Horwitz | 12 comments | Continued-
The Latest
The Snow Plowers’ Petition
The following might have happened in a small college town in upstate New York… In a cold and snowy... Read More
Super Bowl versus Education?
In the spirit of Super Bowl weekend I’d like to deconstruct a Facebook status update that a friend... Read More
Capitalism, Corporatism, and the Freed Market
When a front-running presidential contender tells the country that thanks to Barack Obama, “[w]e are... Read More
Creating Jobs versus Creating Value
Picking on New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is one of the largest participation sports on the Internet.... Read More
The Boston Red Sox and Bad Baseball Economics
The Boston Red Sox are following our politicians’ lead, enacting paternalistic market restrictions... Read More
