Economics

Joseph A. Schumpeter is identified with two related ideas, the notion of the innovative entrepreneur and the imagery of the competitive market as a process of creative destruction.

The fact is, there is far more in the world that successfully manages and “regulates” itself without the controlling hand of the government than many of us pause to reflect on or understand. 

Your building your own deck would be worthwhile only if your cost of doing so is less than the cost of having someone else, such as Jones, build it for you.

The Great Depression was not one, but four consecutive depressions that Professor Hans Sennholz has labeled as four “phases”: the business cycle; the disintegration of the world economy; the New Deal; and the Wagner Act.

Say’s Law of Markets already included the answers to the questions against free markets with which the Keynesians attempted to challenge the efficacy of capitalism a century later.

Amongst Thomas Piketty, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Jerry Yang, and Jeremy Corbyn a wealth tax is all the rage as a means to rectify “wealth inequality”. But what does it really do?

So many CEOs know so little about economics that they don’t know that in a free market producing for the profit of their stockholders in and of itself implies producing for the benefit of everyone.

At any moment in time, the world seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. Manners are missing; ethics are being eliminated; culture is corrupted; social attitudes are supercilious; virtues are vanishing; literature is mostly licentious; industry and commerce are...

It is capitalism and the competitive market process that generates solutions to the knowledge problems of the society, including the “informational asymmetry” that naturally follows from any developed social system of division of labor.

As the economic degree of capitalism rises, not only do profit margins and the rate of profit fall, but wage payments come into being and then rise both absolutely and relative to profits.

In economics Hayek is a radical; but in philosophy, unlike Ayn Rand, Hayek is a conservative.

Any social system must coordinate production and cooperation, and must also implement a system of distribution that participants perceive as sustainable, which often means morally fair. As Nobelist Elinor Ostrom demonstrated, there are many and widely varied social...

Economic growth has been faster when the federal government has been smaller (relative to GDP) – and vice versa.

“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

Ayn Rand publicly recommended the works of Mises but not of Hayek. Today, when Hayek is much better known than Mises, it's worth seeing why. I came to the full realization of what's wrong with Hayek's approach while re-reading Atlas Shrugged. No, not in Galt's speech,...

Those three elements are (a) division of labor; (b) impersonal exchange based on prices; and (3) economies of scale based on knowledge.

Some creative rethinking can put us on the road to a better tomorrow.

Open, competitive markets have a resilient capacity to successfully coordinate the actions of, now, billions of people around the world. With an amazing adaptability to changing circumstances, the actions and reactions of multitudes of suppliers and demanders are...

Despite the support which it historically gave to the exploitation theory, classical economics provides the basis for turning the exploitation theory upside down.

Introduce government intervention into the market system, and monopoly becomes a social harm and an economic problem.