All Posts Tagged With: "consumption"

Exporting and Importing at the University

I’ve been an economics professor at public universities for going on 40 years—the last 30 at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In the parlance of economics, this means I’ve been a long-time “exporter” of economics knowledge. Those paying my salary—students, parents, and taxpayers—have been “importers.” Students and parents import voluntarily. Taxpayers less than voluntarily. [...]

1Apr2008 | | 0 comments | Continued

Presidents Can’t Manage the Economy

The presidential candidates have been repeatedly asked how they would “manage the economy.” With the exception of Ron Paul, every candidate has accepted the premise that this is something the president of the United States should do. Or can do. Nonsense. Democrats act like the president is national economic manager. Republicans pay lip service to [...]

1Apr2008 | | 0 comments | Continued

Consumption Must Be Curtailed to Sustain the Human Race?

Jared Diamond, in a January 2 op-ed in the New York Times, argues for a political solution to what he sees as a looming “consumption crisis” facing humanity. He notes that the current consumption of many resources, such as oil and metals, is roughly 32 times higher in the developed than in the developing world [...]

1Apr2008 | | 1 comment | Continued

An Unstimulating Idea

“It’s like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end.” That’s how George Mason University economist Russell Roberts describes the logic—rather, illogic—of the economic “stimulus” proposals that everyone and his uncle have been proposing. If we needed further demonstration of the folly that is [...]

1Mar2008 | | 1 comment | Continued

Economics for the Citizen Part II

There are four classes of behavior that can be called economic behavior: production, consumption, exchange, and specialization. Production is any behavior that creates utility, that is, raises the want-satisfying capacity of something. When a mill smelts iron ore, it raises the want-satisfying capacity of the material by changing its form. The metal’s want-satisfying capacity is [...]

1Sep2005 | | 1 comment | Continued

Free Trade’s Never-Ending Battle

Arthur Foulkes is a freelance writer living in Indiana. Bastiat, did you live in vain? I can think of few people who did more for the cause of free trade in his lifetime than Frédéric Bastiat. A nineteenth-century French lawmaker, pamphleteer, economist, and philosopher, Bastiat is well known to free-trade advocates even today. His classic [...]

1Sep2004 | | 5 comments | Continued

Competition Is Cooperation

Much animosity toward capitalism among academic critics can be accounted for by a distaste for competition. The critics just don’t like it. It seems so rough, so uncaring, so vulgar, and laboring under the misapprehension that its opposite is cooperation, they endorse the latter in righteous tones while condemning competition as the “law of the [...]

1Jun2003 | | 0 comments | Continued

Consumption Can Drive Economic Growth?

Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions about America’s recent period of high growth is that consumption was the principal driver behind it. Embodied as the notion of a so-called wealth effect, the misconception is so deeply entrenched that its internal contradictions are overlooked and alternative views are simply ignored. As it is, this misguided thinking [...]

1Nov2001 | | 7 comments | Continued

Tax Cuts Cause Trade Deficits and Currency Depreciation?

In a recent New York Times opinion piece Franco Modigliani and Robert M. Solow, Nobel Prize-winning economists, weighed in with yet another leftist objection to President Bush’s tax cut. The gist of their criticism is that such a “massive, permanent tax cut” will worsen the international economic position of the United States, leading to a [...]

1Aug2001 | | 1 comment | Continued

Say’s Law Is Back

“Keynes . . . misunderstood and misrepresented Say’s Law. . . . This is Keynes’s most enduring legacy and it is a legacy which has disfigured economic theory to this day.” —Steven Kates[1] In researching my forthcoming book, The Story of Modern Economics (to be published by M. E. Sharpe next year), I came across [...]

1Aug1999 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Seven Deadly Sins of High Taxes

Dr. Lee is associate professor of economics at St. Ambrose University College of Business, Davenport, Iowa. By justice a king gives stability to the land, but he who imposes heavy taxes ruins it. —Proverbs 29:4 (New American Bible) In a free society government has an important but limited role to play. Adam Smith, for instance, [...]

1Nov1997 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Flat Tax

To the Editor: In his article “The Flat Tax: Simplicity Desimplified” (The Freeman, October 1996), Roger Garrison implies that those who favor the flat tax do not care about the size of the tax burden. Since the vast majority of flat-tax supporters are big advocates of lower taxes, and since all the major flat-tax proposals [...]

1Dec1996 | | 0 comments | Continued

New Keynesians Finally Reject Keynes’s General Theory

“When people attempt to save more, the actual result may be only a lower level of output . . .” —Paul A. Samuelson[1] “Higher saving leads to faster growth . . .” —N. Gregory Mankiw[2] The two quotations above dramatically demonstrate the stark contrast between the “old” Keynesians and the “new.” Samuelson and the old-style [...]

1Sep1996 | | 1 comment | Continued

A Walk on the Supply Side

In the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ben Stein portrayed a high school teacher droning on about supply-side economics while students fell asleep and even drooled in their seats. Critics of supply-side economics must relish this and other pop-culture references, believing them to buttress their own view of supply-side as a kind of “pop economics.” [...]

1Jun1995 | | 0 comments | Continued
Newer Entries

    • © Copyright 2011 Freeman - Ideas on Liberty. All rights reserved.

    59 queries. 1.832 seconds