I. Introduction: Setting the Stage

“Roundaboutness” is a concept featured in Austrian capital theory. Homely stories about the bare-handed catching of fish are a prelude to a discussion of the economy’s capital structure. The outputs of some stages of production become inputs to others. Production takes time. The capital structure, broadly conceived, has a temporal profile — one that can be modified in response to changes in intertemporal consumption preferences and resource constraints. This was the central message of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1959).

When Ludwig von Mises noted that a manager is a “junior partner” of the entrepreneur, he did not mean to downplay the role of management in the economy. On the contrary, he wanted to make clear how the economic functions are different yet related.

Ever since Senator Bernie Sanders centered his campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination on “Medicare for all,” it has attracted increasing support. In a Kaiser Family Foundation poll last month, 56 percent of all respondents and 81 percent of Democrats backed “a national health plan, sometimes called Medicare for all,” which has been used to advance the assertion that its time has come.

Steven Kates is an Australian economist and the author of Say’s Law and the Keynesian Revolution: How Macroeconomic Theory Lost Its Way and Free Market Economics: An Introduction for the General Reader, now in its third edition  He has long been a perceptive and unrelenting critic of current Keynesian-style macroeconomics and an unabashed defe

Due to Jeff Bezos’ public accusations against the National Enquirer, the topic of blackmail is in the news.

It is fairly easy to imagine the regressive left having childishly high time preference; they see some current social ill (homelessness, potholes , student debt, inequality) and want them abolished right away. If your position is: “solve the problem now, damn the future consequences,” you show a very high discount rate; future costs pale in the face of the current disaster.

With more than a decade having passed since the financial crisis of 2007/8, the mainstream economics profession still seems to be almost as far from agreeing on the ultimate causes of that crisis as they were from being able to foresee its arrival back in the mid-2000’s.

[Found among the papers of Bettina Bien Greaves and reprinted from Plain Talk (1949), Editor’s comment: Those millions of illiterate and semi-literate armed men now in action from the borders of the Yellow Sea to the mountains of Greece have been set in motion by a ponderous and little-read study of economics — Das Kapital — written nearly a century ago by a German scholar named Karl Marx.