All Posts Tagged With: "productivity"
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism
What do the following have in common: hungry Venezuelans, starving North Koreans, ecological devastation in the former Soviet Union, and functionally illiterate students in Washington, D.C., high schools? Give up? They are all consequences of socialism. In his book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, economics professor and National Review editor Kevin Williamson gives the [...]
4Jan2012 | George C. Leef | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Family Stone: Cavemen, Trade, and Comparative Advantage
Imagine a Stone Age family: Papa Stone, Mama Stone, and their two little pebbles. Suppose that, as befits pre-women’s-lib Neanderthals, Papa Stone is initially more competent at every prehistoric survival skill: hunting, fishing, nut-and-berry gathering, firebuilding, tool-making. Despite his superior talents, it does not make sense for other family members to sit around waiting for him to [...]
30Nov2011 | Richard W. Fulmer | 1 comment | ContinuedUnemployment: What’s To Be Done?
In Part 1 I outlined natural unemployment, government-caused unemployment, and the attempts to measure these. We saw how ambiguous and subjective some of the concepts of unemployment are and how the government, specifically the Federal Reserve, is charged with managing it. Now we turn to current conditions and what can be done about them. There [...]
30Nov2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 6 comments | ContinuedThe Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
The eminent UCLA historian Joyce Appleby concludes The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by referring to the persistent nostalgia for socialism: “As one sufferer from Yugonostalgia explained it, ‘in Yugoslavia people had fun. It was a system for lazy people; if you were good or bad, you still got paid. Now, everything is about [...]
26Oct2011 | Leonard P. Liggio | 2 comments | ContinuedFree Markets Have Room for Everyone
If you can create pretty much any amount of value, there’s a wage at which you can be hired and a job for you to do.
28Apr2011 | Steven Horwitz | 15 comments | ContinuedThe Most Elusive Proposition
Most explanations of the division of labor are actually explanations of increased productivity due to specialization. The most common example is Adam Smith’s pin factory in The Wealth of Nations, where each worker becomes better at his job because that’s all he has to concentrate on. But the increase in wealth from the division of [...]
22Oct2010 | Manuel F. Ayau | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Paradox of the Welfare State
Welfare states face an inescapable paradox: The level of production needed to sustain a welfare state cannot be sustained by a welfare state. This paradox is created by policies that encourage the redistribution and consumption of wealth while discouraging its creation. In the face of such perverse incentives, living standards must fall even though, for [...]
22Sep2010 | Richard W. Fulmer | 24 comments | ContinuedWhy Globalization Works
Look at the foes of economic globalization and you’ll find a curious coalition. Some are left-wingers who oppose globalization because they oppose capitalism. But others are right-wing protectionists who don’t like foreign competition. The strength of the anti-globalist coalition has waxed and waned over time, but there is still a large number of people who [...]
13Jul2010 | Martin Morse Wooster | 0 comments | ContinuedCommon Versus Government Property
A central contribution of Elinor Ostrom, which earned her a share of the 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, was to reclaim the commons as a legitimate form of property. (For more detail, see Peter Boettke’s December 2009 Freeman article.) Organization theorist Dick Langlois always makes it a practice in his European economic history class to [...]
19Apr2010 | Kevin A. Carson | 52 comments | ContinuedThe Balance-of-Payments Deficit: Not to Worry
Quick. What’s the trade deficit between California and the rest of the world? Don’t try Googling it because you won’t find an answer. No government agency—or private entity—computes the dollar value of goods that people in the rest of the world sell to or buy from Californians. Why not? Because it doesn’t matter. Yet governments [...]
5Jan2010 | David R. Henderson | 7 comments | ContinuedReal Jobs Create Wealth
If the government’s projects were truly worthwhile, they would be undertaken by private efforts, and in their quest for profits, entrepreneurs would handle them more efficiently.
Remember this when President Obama begins to boast about how successful his stimulus plan is.
21May2009 | John Stossel | 11 comments | ContinuedHierarchy or the Market
In an article in last June’s Freeman, I applied some ideas from the socialist-calculation debate to the private corporation and examined the extent to which it is an island of calculational chaos in the market economy. I’d like to expand that line of analysis now and apply some common free-market insights on knowledge and incentives [...]
1Apr2008 | Kevin A. Carson | 2 comments | ContinuedFree Men for Better Job Performance, Part II
Recognizing the employee as a tenant with a contract to utilize his own property (skills, talents, etc.) to increase the productivity and enhance the value of the employer’s property certainly is not the view now prevailing of the employer-employee relationship.
1Jul2007 | C.L. Dickinson | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Disconnect Between Political Promises and Performance
What can politicians do to create more higher paying jobs? Politicians must think that most of us believe the answer is: a lot. One of the most persistent campaign promises is the creation of good jobs at good wages. I shall argue that politicians can do quite a number of things to increase high-wage employment. [...]
1Apr2006 | Dwight R. Lee | 0 comments | ContinuedA Sparks Sampler
Editor’s Note: John C. Sparks, who died on March 27, 2005, served on the board of trustees of the Foundation for Economic Education for many years. In the mid-1980s, following his retirement from business, he served a term as FEE’s president. In memory of this friend of FEE, we reproduce some of what he wrote [...]
1May2005 | John C. Sparks | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Business Revolution of the Nineteenth Century
The business corporation is one of the most maligned and disliked institutions of our time. The criticism comes from many parts of the political spectrum, and its substance has become a common-sense assumption for many. As ever, much of this criticism lacks historical perspective, despite the inclusion of historical accounts of the growth of large [...]
1Apr2005 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Great Outsourcing Scare of 2004
Last year a protectionist wind filled the air. All the good jobs, Americans were told, were disappearing faster than one could say “New Delhi.” On opening his local newspaper, the typical American would find articles alerting, “As job exports rise, some economists rethink the mathematics of free trade.” Or: “Thomson Trims 1,535 Jobs by Shifting [...]
1Mar2005 | Jude Blanchette | 2 comments | Continued-
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