Elizabeth Warren has made antitrust a major public policy issue in her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. She has argued that several high-tech companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook are just too big and that they should be broken up by the Justice Department in a major antitrust initiative.
What started as a relatively obscure trial covered only by alternative conservative media has exploded into a Big Story, a modern David-defeats-Goliath tale in which a small business has won a victory in court against a well-heeled college whose leftist activist administrators and students tried to destroy it for no good reason.
Perhaps the most destructive premise of modern, mainstream economics is that a central bank-induced monetary/credit expansion can cause an economy to grow without adverse consequences. Let’s be perfectly clear from the start: this policy has been tried by many central banks many times and all such attempts have led to economic disaster. The latest victims are the poor citizens of Venezuela, a once prosperous nation.
Economics is not hard. In fact, as soon as you realize what economic theory means, it is obvious. But the application of it seems hard. For example, all students learn the concept of opportunity cost, but they have no idea how to use this insight. And they typically fail when they try.
It is commonly believed that market competition leads to monopoly. Industries start out small with startup firms trying to out-innovate each other. But, in time, this competition gives way to economies of scale as competitors merge or take over each other. Competition thus leads to imperfect competition and oligopoly, and eventually to monopoly. The remaining firm, if unregulated, can then jack up prices to exploit consumers.
Capitalism in America: A History
Alan Greenspan and Adrian Wooldridge
New York: Penguin, 2018, 486 pp.
Joakim Book (j@joakimbook.com) is a graduate student at Oxford University.
Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 22, no. 1 (Spring 2019), full issue, click here.
Editor’s Note: The following essay was written while Rothbard was working on “Origins of the Welfare State in America,” which was originally published posthumously in the Journal of Libertarian Studies in 1996 (Rothbard 1996). “Origins” was included as Chapter 11 in The Progressive Era (Rothbard 2017). The draft pages of “Beginning the Welfare State” label it as Section 4. Rothbard most likely took it out and rewrote “Origins” so it would focus more on the Progressive Era intellectuals and reformers in the early-twentieth century.
There are lots of ways to kill off a civilization. Wars, politics, economic collapse. But what are the actual mechanics? It might be a useful thing to know whether or not we are killing ourselves off.
If we consider economics to be an objective science, its rules should also have universal significance and use, despite differences in societal order. However, socialists of the materialist camp are committed to the idea that common ownership of the means of production would change the way economic laws unfold under socialism. Basically, they reject the notion of the universality and objectivity of economic rules by suggesting that the laws would change along with a change to the social formation.
ABSTRACT: This paper analyzes and elaborates on what Murray Rothbard would have included in Chapter 10 of his nine-chapter manuscript on the Progressive Era (Rothbard 2017). In Chapter 10, Rothbard planned to describe the political and local reforms of the fourth party system (1896–1932). The reforms included voter registration, ballot changes, direct election of senators, the primary system, attacks on machine politics, the institutionalization of civil service, and the expansion of city governments.
