All Posts Tagged With: "spontaneous order"
Competition Would Save Medicine, Too
Competition so regularly brings us better stuff—cars, phones, shoes, medicine—that we’ve come to expect it. We complain on the rare occasion the supermarket doesn’t carry a particular ice-cream flavor. We just assume the store will have 30,000 items, that it will be open 24/7, and that the food will be fresh and cheap.
I take it [...]
What Human Action Has Meant to Me: Reflections of a Young Economist
I remember well when I discovered Human Action. I remember because it has had the profoundest influence on my development as an economist not only up to that point, but also since then.
I first read Human Action when I was in high school. At the time I was very much interested in, and influenced by, supply-side [...]
“I, Pencil” Revisited
Leonard Read’s classic essay, “I, Pencil,” is justly celebrated as the best short introduction to the division of labor and undesigned order ever written. But it holds another, largely overlooked lesson as well: “I, Pencil” is an excellent primer in the Austrian approach to capital theory.
Read’s pencil describes its family tree, beginning with the cedars [...]
The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity
The primary characters in The Price of Everything are Ruth Lieber, an economics professor and provost at Stanford University, and Ramon Fernandez, a Cuban immigrant tennis prodigy studying there. Ramon is saturated with hostility toward the market process, while Ruth has a strong appreciation of markets and liberty. Their conversations—serves and volleys of economic ideas—form [...]
2Apr2009 | E. Frank Stephenson | 0 comments | ContinuedPoker and the Free Market
Good poker players are like entrepreneurs: You need greater skill than average to anticipate the future. As Mises so cogently puts it in Human Action, “What distinguishes the successful entrepreneur and promoter from other people is precisely the fact that he does not let himself be guided by what was and is, but arranges his affairs on the ground of his opinion about the future. He sees the past and the present as other people do; but he judges the future in a different way.”
20Jan2009 | Robert Stewart | 0 comments | ContinuedAdam Smith in China
James Dorn is a China specialist at the Cato Institute and professor of economics at Towson University in Maryland. A shorter version of this article first appeared in the Times of India, January 24, 2007.
China’s transition from plan to market since 1978 has not only increased prosperity but also has led to a new way [...]
Institutions and Development: The Case of China
James Dorn (jdorn@cato.org) is a China specialist and vice president for academic affairs at the Cato Institute. He is coeditor of China’s Future: Constructive Partner or Emerging Threat? (Cato Institute, 2000).
An earlier version of this article appeared in Vital Speeches of the Day (November 15, 2005).
From a liberal perspective the goal of economic development is [...]
Book Reviews – September 2004
The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life
by Paul Seabright
Princeton University Press • 2004 • 304 pages • $29.95
Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
One of the most profound insights of economics is that the activities of billions of people can be coordinated without central direction and without most of these interdependent people knowing anything [...]
Why Are Economists So Misunderstood?
Russel Roberts is a professor of economics at George Mason University and the J. Fish and Lillian F. Smith Distinguished Scholar at the Mercatus Center. He is the author of The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance.
Here is a puzzle.
I’m at a social gathering that includes some doctors. One doctor is discussing a prescription drug for [...]
Individualism and Intelligence
Donald Boudreaux is chairman of the economics department of George Mason University and former president of FEE.
How intelligent are human beings?
This short question is complex. Of course, intelligence exists in many varieties. A math genius might believe in the predictive powers of Tarot cards; a great novelist might stumble over the simplest exercise in logic; [...]
Free-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 airplanes.
Recently, Don [...]
Capitalism and the Weak
One allegation about capitalism is that it enables the strong to crush the weak. Some critics contend it models the ruthlessness of biological Darwinism’s extermination of the weak through natural selection. In the Marxist view the entire proletarian class is enchained by the power of capitalists and must seize for itself the ownership of the [...]
1May2002 | Daniel Hager | 0 comments | ContinuedRebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution
Perseus Publishing • 2001 • 334 pages • $27.50
Reviewed by Andrew Morriss
During the Microsoft antitrust trial a great deal of ink was spilled in the press over Microsoft’s alleged monopolization of various markets and its practices in marketing both its browser (Internet Explorer) and its operating systems (such as Windows 2000). Although Judge Thomas Penfield [...]
Toward an Austrian Critique of Governmental Economic Policy
Israel Kirzner is a professor of economics at New York University. This is the fourth (and last) of a series of articles laying out some foundational elements of modern Austrian economics.
In preceding articles we outlined the way in which Austrian economists understand the entrepreneurial competitive market process that is responsible for the law of supply [...]
The Law of Supply and Demand
Israel Kirzner is a emeritus professor of economics at New York University and author of The Meaning of Market Process. This is the first in a series of articles laying out some foundational elements of modern Austrian economics. The second article is here.
The theory of supply and demand is recognized almost universally as the first [...]
1Jan2000 | Israel M. Kirzner | 3 comments | ContinuedA Tribute to the Jitney
So reads the official ban on one of the oldest illegal businesses that still operate openly in Detroit, Michigan. The rather emphatic language says, in effect, “We don’t want any part of this!” And yet on public bulletin boards at grocery, drug, and department stores all over the city, one can find notices that announce, “For Jitney Service, Call This Number.”
1Jan2000 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | Continued-
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Book Reviews
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
