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 [...]
19Aug2009 | John Stossel | 11 comments | ContinuedWhat 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, [...]
19Aug2009 | Peter T. Leeson | 3 comments | Continued“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 [...]
24Apr2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedThe 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 | ContinuedSurreptitious Serendipity
Though I’m almost hesitant to draw an economic conclusion from the recent airplane crash on the Hudson, I’m only almost hesitant. Examples of spontaneous order are always, by their nature, unplanned. Jeff Kolodjay (a passenger on the plane), perhaps unknowingly, articulated his encounter with spontaneous order. When asked to describe his experience, he said that [...]
22Jan2009 | Margaret Morgan | 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 | 2 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 [...]
1May2007 | James A. Dorn | 2 comments | ContinuedInstitutions 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 [...]
1Jun2006 | James A. Dorn | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Political Sociology of Freedom: Adam Ferguson and F. A. Hayek
When I was a young economics major back in the 1970s, one of the standard arguments that many of my professors would hurl at me was: “Your ideal of free-market capitalism may have been all right 200 years ago, when society was a lot simpler, but in a society as complex as ours is today, [...]
22Apr2006 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedWhy Classical Liberals Care about the Rule of Law (And Hardly Anyone Else Does)
In 1776 John Adams declared that America was “a
nation of laws, not men.” Politicians of all persuasions
have used Adams’s phrase ever since to claim
the moral high ground. Such rare agreement among the
political classes, even if only rhetorical, is an indication
of the power of the idea of the rule of law.
Why Freedom Matters
The future of civilization depends on preserving and spreading freedom. As a moral principle, freedom means we ought to respect private property rights, broadly understood as the rights to life, liberty, and property. As a practical matter, when private property rights are protected by law, individuals will be free to trade for mutual gain and [...]
1Jul2005 | James A. Dorn | 0 comments | ContinuedHypnotized by Models
We live in an age where abstract models of the real world are held in high regard. Wall Street firms hire mathematicians and physicists to create sophisticated mathematical representations of various assets and markets. Meteorologists employ computer simulations in an attempt to anticipate the path of storms and predict next week’s weather. Marketing firms try [...]
1Mar2005 | Gene Callahan | 1 comment | ContinuedBook 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 [...]
1Sep2004 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedWhy Are Economists So Misunderstood?
Here is a puzzle. I’m at a social gathering that includes some doctors. One doctor is discussing a prescription drug for a particular ailment. I interrupt with a lengthy discourse on the medication, explaining that the doctor’s understanding is faulty. He has misunderstood the most important applications of the drug. His analysis of the side [...]
1Jan2004 | Russell Roberts | 8 comments | ContinuedThoughts of Miracles on the Plane
William Zieburtz is a dad, economist, and frequent traveler residing in Atlanta, Georgia. I am right now flying through the air. It is just me, just regular old me, just my mother’s son, and yet I am flying 37,000 feet above the ground. It seems miraculous, and miracles give rise to questions. The first being—what [...]
1Dec2003 | William B. Zieburtz Jr. | 1 comment | ContinuedIndividualism and Intelligence
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; a stellar manager might be ignorant of literature. While interesting, this particular complexity afflicting the [...]
1May2003 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 1 comment | ContinuedFree-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 [...]
1Jan2003 | Ralph Hood | 0 comments | Continued-
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