All Posts Tagged With: "trade"
The 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 | ContinuedReed Talks Trade at Liberty Forum in Brazil
In April FEE president Lawrence W. Reed was a guest at Liberty Forum in Brazil, where he discussed the benefits of trade and the role of Internet. Tyler Cowen, the George Mason University economics professor and Marginal Revolution blogger, also participated.
6Jul2011 | Tsvetelin M. Tsonevski | 2 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 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 | ContinuedVermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World
Timothy Brook has written a fascinating work on the pivotal seventeenth century, one that defies neat categorization. It isn’t a history per se, although it is about a crucial period of history. It isn’t really about economics, but it conveys a considerable amount of economic understanding. Nor is it a work on philosophy, even though [...]
11Jun2009 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | ContinuedWarriors and Merchants
In 1915 the well-known German economic historian Werner Sombart published a book with the arresting title Merchants and Heroes. It argued that the war then underway between the Central Powers and the Entente was not just a traditional great-power conflict. It was rather a struggle between two different worldviews embodied by France and Britain on [...]
1Nov2005 | Stephen Davies | 0 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 [...]
1Oct2004 | Manuel F. Ayau | 2 comments | 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 | ContinuedBorn Capitalist: Free Markets and Hominid Evolution
Robert Wright (alexanderhamilton@comcast.net) is author of Wealth of Nations Rediscovered (Cambridge) and Hamilton Unbound (Greenwood), coauthor of Mutually Beneficial (NYU Press, 2003), and co-editor of History of Corporate Finance and Corporate Governance in Historical Perspective (both Pickering and Chatto, 2003). The generic term for bipedal apes, including Homo sapiens or modern humans, is hominid. Since [...]
1Jun2003 | Robert E. Wright | 1 comment | ContinuedOn Reading History
Economics is the discipline that I loved first and that I continue to love above all. The economic way of thinking—as the late Paul Heyne called it—is a potent solvent for cutting through the nonsense and irrelevancies that typically loom large in policy discussions. No one lacking a solid grasp of economic principles can understand [...]
1Aug2001 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | ContinuedNonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright
Vintage Books • 2001 • 448 pages • $15.00 paperback In Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, Robert Wright argues that gains from trade, or “nonzero” transactions, is the motivating force driving human history. Because of the advantages of engaging in nonzero-sum transactions, it was virtually inevitable that living organisms would evolve whose primary function [...]
1Apr2001 | Todd Zywicki | 0 comments | ContinuedCapitalism and the Zero
John Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation, a state policy think tank in North Carolina, and author of The Heroic Enterprise: Business and the Common Good (Free Press). In traditional discussions of the rise of free-market capitalism, great attention is paid to changes in institutions, technologies, and ideologies. We read the great philosophers [...]
1Dec2000 | John Hood | 1 comment | ContinuedTrade and Freedom in China: A Reality Check
China’s authoritarian government regularly and systematically ignores universally recognized rights. It is beyond dispute that the Communist Party detains individuals for expressing political opinions and for practicing religious beliefs that are viewed to be subversive to the control of the central authorities. Apologists for Beijing often try to raise an argument based on moral relativism [...]
1Sep2000 | Christopher Lingle | 0 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 | ContinuedMay the Force Not Be With You
I’m just back from seeing Star Wars: Episode I, The Phantom Menace with my 11-year-old son, Ben. The space adventure, full of eye-popping special effects, lives up to expectations. But, alas, I must report on an aspect that will be disappointing to readers of The Freeman. The conflict that is the focus of the movie [...]
1Aug1999 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedHow Cities Put the Brakes on Taxicabs
Sam Staley is vice president for research at Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions in Dayton, Ohio, directs the Urban Futures Program for the Los Angeles-based Reason Public Policy Institute, and has more than ten years of experience in local government consulting. The lifeblood of any economy is its people. Human progress ultimately springs from [...]
1Mar1998 | Samuel R. Staley | 0 comments | ContinuedRoads Without the State
Peter Samuel is editor and publisher of Toll Roads, a monthly newletter. Can there be roads if the government doesn’t build them? The first roads were probably not even made by humans but by animals. Herds of buffalo, deer, and other grass foragers pushed aside the shrubs and trampled down the grass to make tracks [...]
1Jan1998 | Peter Samuel | 1 comment | Continued-
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