All Posts Tagged With: "production"
The Right Amount of Manufacturing
Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, recently pointed out that in 2009 the U.S. economy had the world’s largest manufacturing sector. (The most recent data show that China’s sector edged out the United States because of our slow economic recovery.) Every year since 2004 U.S. manufacturing output, in constant 2005 dollars, [...]
22Jun2011 | David R. Henderson | 7 comments | ContinuedCapitalism as Art
Both entrepreneurship and consumption are acts of creativity, imagination, and art.
9Jun2011 | Steven Horwitz | 3 comments | ContinuedConsumption, Innovation, and the Source of Wealth
Innovation by producers, not consumption, is what creates wealth in a market economy. Sometimes the simplest truths are the hardest for the self-proclaimed elite to understand.
6Jan2011 | Steven Horwitz | 8 comments | ContinuedA Nation of Consumers?
A fundamental tenet of economics is that the end of production is consumption. Unfortunately, Keynesian economists seizing the public microphone claim the purpose of consumption is to clear the shelves so producers will have something to do in the future.
17Nov2010 | William L. Anderson | 9 comments | ContinuedIs It Spending or Consumption?
Anyone who believes an economy is nothing more than a mechanical operation in which some people produce, others spend, and then government makes up the difference really does not understand economic processes.
21Jul2010 | William L. Anderson | 1 comment | ContinuedPhony Food Crisis
Green icon Paul Ehrlich is widely known for his absurdly inaccurate projections regarding population and food. Rarely does a doomsday projection pass by without his embracing it. But most of his previous false claims are forgotten, or ignored, by the anti-capitalist coalition of today. After all, Ehrlich made those claims in 1968, and that was [...]
27Jun2010 | James Peron | 1 comment | ContinuedDeflation: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
During the current recession a number of commentators have made various comparisons to the Great Depression, mostly because of the dramatic decline in the stock market and ongoing troubles in the financial industry. When oil prices also began a dramatic decline in the autumn of 2008, pulling the overall consumer price level downward for the [...]
5Jan2010 | Steven Horwitz | 59 comments | ContinuedExporting 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 | T. Norman Van Cott | 0 comments | ContinuedPresidents 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 | John Stossel | 0 comments | ContinuedAn 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 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedEconomics 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 | Walter E. Williams | 1 comment | ContinuedCompetition 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 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedTime and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure by Roger W. Garrison
Routledge • 2001 • 272 pages • $99.00 Reviewed by Robert Batemarco Although it was Tolstoy who said that “the highest wisdom has but one science—the science of the whole,” these words express with uncanny accuracy the practice of the Austrian school of economics. One of the hallmarks of that school is that it sees [...]
1Jun2002 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | ContinuedPolluting Production
Politicians use language differently from the rest of us. Take the expression “Big Polluters.” Big Oil produces oil. Big Pharmaceuticals produce medicines. I guess Big Polluters produce air and water pollution. What’s more, they somehow make big profits doing so. How this works I’m not sure. Who would pay for pollution? Obviously, there are no [...]
1Mar2001 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | ContinuedTrade and the Rise of Freedom
Thomas DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland. This is adapted from a paper presented at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s conference on “’The History of Liberty” at Auburn University, January 29, 2000. It is no exaggeration to say that trade is the keystone of modern civilization. As Murray Rothbard wrote, “The [...]
1Jun2000 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 2 comments | ContinuedWar
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French economist, free-trade activist, and member of the French legislature after the Revolution of 1848. This is a chapter from his treatise, Economic Harmonies, translated by W. Hayden Boyers, which along with his other works is available from FEE. Among all the circumstances that have some part in giving to [...]
1Jun2000 | Frederic Bastiat | 2 comments | ContinuedSay’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 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | Continued-
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