Rothbard covers the principles of demand and supply curves. Prices are at the seat of the whole system. Use the logic of reality. The most mobile labor force is teenagers. Over time, capital equipment per laborer increases. Real wage rates increase. Consumer prices decrease.
Recorded at the Reassessing the Presidency seminar; March 2004. (33:49)
Recorded at the 2003 Supporters Summit: Prosperty, War, and Depression.
(29:32)
The Chinese "yellow peril" was the late nineteenth century menace. And today, write Cecil Bohanon and T.N. Van Cott, the menace is outsourcing. The Chinese and Indians are selling Americans things like computer software at bargain basement prices. But there is nothing special about outsourcing software technology. All that matters is whether the Chinese and Indians sell for less than what current American software producers could earn in their next most lucrative employment. If so, outsourcing enhances U.S. living standards.
Trade with China is beneficial to the U.S. economy, writes Grant Nülle, but grave danger lurks in the area of monetary policy. Beijing is furnishing cheap credit to finance Washington's fiscal deficit and consumer indebtedness in America, accentuating a misallocation of capital and investment priorities propagated by the Fed-backed fiat money. Meanwhile, China's four largest state-owned banks, which together claim 61% of the country's loans and 67% of its deposits, are saddled with mounting bad debts.
Mateusz Machaj, founder of the Mises Institute, Poland, argues that international trade theory isn't a stand-alone topic. It is a practical application of general trade theory to trading between persons from different countries. There is no difference between mobility of factors of production inside or outside a country.
Some distinguished theorists have lately entered into a debate over the merits of free trade after two of them had suggested that "free trade has necessary conditions" and "today these conditions are not met". In particular, they mean that David Ricardo's law of comparative advantage don't hold if the "factors of production" are free to move around, particularly if money and laboring persons are able to move faster than goods. Thus, in a way, this argument says that since people are free to move around, move their money around as well as their goods, free trade is bad. But how can it be that free movement of persons, money and goods is bad for free trade? How can it be that free trade is bad for free trade?
