All Posts Tagged With: "resources"

Destroying Value

In Cleveland and other American cities homes are being demolished because five years after the housing bust there is nothing better to do with them. Therein lies a lesson in Austrian business cycle theory. In a world of uncertainty, waste—the destruction of value—is inevitable. Human action, which aims to replace inferior circumstances with superior circumstances, [...]

4Jan2012 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued

Affording It All

People who don’t understand—or who don’t care about—economics say funny things. Well, they would be funny if they weren’t so damaging when translated into government policy. Take Lawrence O’Donnell, host of MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. He must be a smart guy. He’s articulate. He’s been an adviser to a senator of some [...]

24Aug2011 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued

The Canard of “Underutilized Resources”

Last November the Federal Open Market Committee announced plans to purchase, by printing money, $600 billion of long-term government bonds over the next 6 months. This “quantitative easing,” Fed Chairman Bernanke assures us, is necessary to aid an economy that is suffering from “a very high level of underutilization of resources.” In other words, there’s [...]

24Feb2011 | Tyler Watts | 1 comment | Continued

The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty Not Affluence, Is the Environment’s Number One Enemy

The extraordinary thing about this excellent book is not its content as much as its source. Jack M. Hollander is a retired professor of energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley. Although he has had an impressive career in the field of energy (he has more than 100 publications to his credit), in [...]

6Jul2010 | Jane S. Shaw | 0 comments | Continued

Economists and Scarcity

In a world where concerns about the environment and resources dominate political discussion and, for people like Al Gore, are a “generational mission [that gives] moral purpose” to our lives, thinking clearly about these issues is crucial. Economics can contribute to this discussion by providing its perspective on words such as “scarcity” and “resources,” which [...]

1Jun2008 | Steven Horwitz | 1 comment | Continued

Our Most Precious Resource

Mr. Zarbin, a retired newspaperman, does historical research and writing in Phoenix, Arizona. More often than I can recall, I have heard people, especially at school graduations, say that children are our (the nation’s, the country’s) most precious resource. This declaration always chills me. Children are not a resource, metaphorically or otherwise. Children are growing, [...]

1Nov1996 | Earl Zarbin | 1 comment | Continued

Prosperity Without Pollution

Mr. Semmens is an economist with Laissez-Faire Institute in Chandler, Arizona. I recently had the opportunity to participate in a World Future Society “debate” on whether we could reduce pollution without also reducing our economic well-being. Mainstream thinking asserts that we must sacrifice at least some of our prosperity in order to protect the environment. [...]

1Mar1996 | John Semmens | 2 comments | Continued

The Ownership And Control Of Water

Editor’s note: “What is the libertarian philosophy concerning ownership, control and use of water resources?” asks a professor who is studying the subject. That is about as tough a question as has ever been thrown at F.E.E.—a problem to which we’ve given little, if any, attention. But what an opportunity for a libertarian to test [...]

1Nov1955 | Alexis De Tocqueville | 2 comments | Continued

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