Of all of the articles I have written, this one has pained me the most to write. In it, I will have to site and at times defend John Maynard Keynes, not his “General Theory”, but another paper he wrote in 1930 titled, “Economic Prospect of our Grandchildren“. If you haven’t read it, please read…
Psychologists and psychiatrists, over the recent years, have uncovered a phenomenon they call, “pathological altruism”. They describe how someone may have such an insatiable desire to help someone else, that they may actually be doing the recipient of that help more harm than good, without realizing it. Free marketeers have witnessed and described this very same behavior…
Recently, Seattle has been the buzz of free market enthusiasts throughout social media and business websites. Soon, Seattle will attempt to implement a “living wage” of $15 per hour. The web has been awash in reports of restaurants and small businesses already closing their doors or , at least, preparing to downsize significantly in…
A few days ago, I had a discussion with a co-worker about the need for the government to regulate “The Market”. Consistently, the definition of terms, most certainly economic terms, leads the discussion to devolve into a debate. Each side arguing past the other as definitions of words or terms are taken for…
Creative destruction has become again, a popular term to explain the dislocation of workers in western labor markets. Although first coined by Karl Marx to describe how capitalism would be destroyed by the bourgeois, Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), an Austrian economist, (not part of the Mengarian Austrian Economic School) modified the meaning to be understood as the…
The Austrian School of Economics has been at the forefront of price theory. Beginning with Carl Menger, the founding patriarch, through others such as, Böhm-Bawerk, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, Lachmann, Kirzner and more have advanced the theory of prices. It is generally accepted that prices are a function of supply and demand. But, there’s more.
One of the fundamental laws of economics is that human beings act on incentives. People make choices to act every day, all the time. The choices they make, are without fail, whether they will be left better or worse off. As a matter of fact, people remain inactive until they have made their choice whether…
The Blue Collar Economist 