All Posts Tagged With: "Adam Smith"
Self Interest, Part I
Asked on camera by John Stossel “Who has done more good for humanity, Michael Milken or Mother Teresa?” philosopher David Kelley unhesitatingly answered, “Michael Milken.” Kelley is surely correct. But I’ve spoken to many people who are horrified by this answer. Mother Teresa’s name is synonymous with good deeds and humanitarian concern. In contrast, Michael [...]
1Feb2003 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 1 comment | ContinuedFree-Market Miracle: From Sri Lanka to Wal-Mart
Ralph Hood is a writer in Huntsville, Alabama. Having spent much of my adulthood in the aviation industry, I belong to the Greater Northern Alabama Lying Pilots’ Coffee Drinking and Tale Telling Society. We meet erratically and unreliably, solely for our own entertainment. One member, Don Langford, flies freight all over the world in huge [...]
1Jan2003 | Ralph Hood | 0 comments | ContinuedA Beautiful Movie, Lousy Economics
A Beautiful Mind, winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Motion Picture, dramatizes the life of John Forbes Nash, who in 1994 was a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in economics. It was based in part on Sylvia Nasar’s 1998 biography of the same name. As the first major Hollywood movie that centers on [...]
1Aug2002 | Sandy Ikeda | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Bias Favoring Governments over Markets
The thrust of my columns could be summarized as follows: We would be better off increasing our reliance on the voluntary cooperation of the marketplace and reducing our reliance on government commands. This is not an idle assertion reflecting blind ideology or religious zeal, as some would claim. It is based on an impressive foundation [...]
1Jun2002 | Dwight R. Lee | 0 comments | ContinuedEnron Lessons
The Enron soap opera continues to unfold. and as it unfolds, lessons are being learned. Some people are learning lessons about the energy business. Some are learning lessons about the securities business. Some are learning lessons about the accounting business. But some are not content to learn such narrow lessons. They want to look at [...]
1Jun2002 | Russell Roberts | 1 comment | ContinuedPeace on Earth, Good Will Toward Men Through Capitalism and Freedom!
“A great multitude of religious sects . . . might in time [become] free of every mixture of absurdity, imposture, of fanaticism.” —Adam Smith1 In this time of thanksgiving and holiday cheer, we here at the Foundation for Economic Education wish everyone peace, prosperity, and happiness. Leonard Read, our founder, wrote that freedom of choice [...]
1Dec2001 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | ContinuedBastiat: Champion of Economic Liberty
Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. When this article first appeared, he was Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics and chairman of the economics department at Hillsdale College in Michigan. The defense of economic liberty has never been an easy task. Adam Smith expressed his own despair at this problem in The Wealth of [...]
1Jun2001 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedPulling Down the Keynesian Cross
In his third and final volume on John Maynard Keynes, Robert Skidelsky comes to the shocking conclusion that the Keynesian revolution was temporary, that Keynes’s General Theory was really only a “special” case, and that “free market liberalism” has ultimately triumphed. This is all the more amazing given that Lord Skidelsky has spent the past 20 years of his professional career studying Keynes and resides in Keynes’s old estate, Tilton House. Few scholars would have the guts to repudiate the theory of the man they adore.
1Jun2001 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | ContinuedIt All Started with Adam
Adam Smith, that is. Having just completed writing a history of economics,[1] I have concluded that, despite the protestations of Murray Rothbard and other detractors, the eighteenth-century moral philosopher and celebrated author of The Wealth of Nations deserves to be named the founding father of modern economics.
1May2001 | Mark Skousen | 2 comments | ContinuedDivide and Conquer
If I had to pick my favorite sentence in all of Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action (a daunting task in a 900-page book), it would be this one: “The fact that my fellow man wants shoes as I do does not make it harder for me to get shoes, but easier” (p. 673 of the [...]
1Dec2000 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedAdam Smith: Moral Philosopher
James Otteson is a professor of philosophy at the University of Alabama. Adam Smith was not solely an economist, though that is almost exclusively how he is known today. His Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (WN) is one of the most important books in the Western tradition. Aside from [...]
1Nov2000 | James R. Otteson | 0 comments | ContinuedGreed Versus Compassion
What’s the noblest of human motivations? Some might be tempted to answer: charity, love of one’s neighbor, or, in modern, politically correct language, giving something back or feeling another’s pain. In my book, these are indeed noble motivations, but they pale in comparison to a much more potent motivation for human action.
1Oct2000 | Walter E. Williams | 1 comment | ContinuedEconomists’ Misplaced Faith in an Invisible Hand
Contributing editor Daniel Klein is associate professor of economics at Santa Clara University. He is editor of What Do Economists Contribute?, recently published by New York University Press and the Cato Institute. In academia most economists practice technical crafts. Academic incentives strongly favor such crafts, and economists pursue academic rewards, perhaps with a faith in [...]
1Aug2000 | Daniel B. Klein | 0 comments | ContinuedNeither Left nor Right
The problem with the pendulum approach is that Adam Smith is characterized as “extreme” as Karl Marx. By implication, neither economist is sensible.
1Jul2000 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | ContinuedIs Greed Good?
“Unbridled avarice is not in the least the equivalent of capitalism, still less its ‘spirit’.” —Max Weber[1] Recently greed has become a popular term of endearment. There’s even a TV game show by that name. In 1987, Oliver Stone released a popular movie called Wall Street, in which Gordon Gekko, the fictional dealmaker extraordinaire, declares, [...]
1May2000 | Mark Skousen | 1 comment | ContinuedIndividualism in Modern Thought from Adam Smith to Hayek
Some social theorists believe that moral, political, and economic order must be imposed according to some central plan. In their view, only constant management can generate and sustain the complex, mutually supportive norms of advanced societies. Another tradition in social thought defends an “open society” one founded on respect for voluntarism and individual freedom. Thinkers [...]
1Dec1999 | Andrew I. Cohen | 1 comment | ContinuedInvisible Hand Obsolete?
Allen Murray’s Wall Street Journal article “Pushing Adam Smith Past the Millennium” (June 21, 1999) purports to discuss the relevancy of Adam Smith’s invisible hand for the 21st century. In reality, Murray is not talking about Smith or his invisible-hand metaphor at all. The assumption beneath his conclusion that “Smith’s ideas will need some rethinking [...]
1Nov1999 | Roy Cordato | 0 comments | Continued-
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