Menger showed that value is the name of an attitude or disposition that a particular person adopts toward a good: he chooses to value it. Although Menger set economics on the path to a correct theory of value in 1871, writes Gene Callahan, ancient errors die hard. We can still find many erroneous conceptions of value in contemporary discussions of economic issues.
When the employer paid portion of the tax is added, then the percentage of American households that pay more in payroll taxes than income taxes is 74%. This is robbery of an entire generation of workers--in the name of providing them security, no less--and yet hardly anyone wants to talk about it.
What is the true extent of poverty in the U.S.? We'll never know. The official measures are problematic to the point of being meaningless. But the larger lesson of the Census Bureau's difficulties in estimating poverty is that any measure of poverty is bound to be problematic to the point of being meaningless. Don Mathews explains.
Graduate students at elite universities that have long proclaimed "solidarity" with organized labor are now actively attempting (and sometimes succeeding) in organizing unions of their own. And they are doing it in the face of opposition from labor-supporting faculty members and administrators. But while it might be tempting to pour some more sauce on the gander, there is another side to this story.
The Nobel prize was granted for an economist's work in "cointegration," a statistical and econometric technique that seeks to discover fixed relationships in historical data. But human beings are not machines, which is why Mises wrote: "As a method of economic analysis econometrics is a childish play with figures that does not contribute anything to the elucidation of the problems of economic reality."
The fundamental issue in banking and monetary policy, writes Guido Hülsmann, is whether government can improve the monetary institutions of the unhampered market. All government intervention in this field boils down to schemes that increase the quantity of money beyond what it otherwise would be. Such schemes confer no social benefit but rather only serve redistributive purposes.
Mises was quite clear on the dividing line between psychology and praxeology: Psychology deals with theories to explain why people choose certain ends, or how people will act in certain settings. Praxeology, on the other hand, deals with the logical implications of the fact that people have ends and the fact that they act to achieve them. Robert Murphy explains.
Overall economic efficiency does not concern GDP growth per se, writes DW MacKenzie. It concerns the satisfaction of consumer demand. Increased military spending does not directly satisfy consumer demand. Nor do increased deficits and monetary stimulation substitute for market forces. They only set in motion another round of cyclical economic trends.
Many economists have suggested that the weakening in the US dollar could actually be good for the economy—since a weaker dollar will boost manufacturing production, which in turn will lift employment and all this will set in motion economic growth. Nonsense, says Frank Shostak: the emergence of competitive devaluations is the surest way of destroying the market economy and plunging the world into a period of crisis.
Remedies for government failure must be radical in nature. Wishing and waiting for an "army" of Mr. Smiths or pre-Beltway Phil Gramm thinkalikes to arrive in Washington D.C. is naïve. Better public-sector outcomes must wait not upon better people but upon a better system that does not permit some to live at others' expense.
