8. The Entrepreneurial Component in the Market Interest Rate
In the ERE, as we have seen, the interest rate throughout the economy will be uniform. In the real world there is an additional entrepreneurial (or “risk”) component, which adds to the interest rate in particularly risky ventures, and in accordance with the degree of risk. (Since “risk” has an actuarially “certain” connotation, we may better call it “degree of uncertainty.”) Thus, suppose that the basic social time-preference rate, or pure rate of interest, in the economy is 5 percent.
9. Risk, Uncertainty, and Insurance
Entrepreneurship deals with the inevitable uncertainty of the future. Some forms of uncertainty, however, can be converted into actuarial risk.
1. Entrepreneurial Profit and Loss
HAVING DEVELOPED IN THE PREVIOUS chapters our basic analysis of the market economy, we now proceed to discuss more dynamic and specific applications, as well as the consequences of intervention in the market.
2. The Effect of Net Investment
Having considered the ERE and its relation to specific entrepreneurial profit and loss, let us now turn to the problem: When will there be aggregate profits or losses in the economy? This is connected with the question: What is the effect of a change in the level of aggregate saving or investment in the economy?
It’s Income-Tax Day in America. In The Ethics of Liberty, Rothbard stated the obvious when he wrote:
It would be an instructive exercise for the skeptical reader to try to frame a definition of taxation which does not also include theft. Like the robber, the State demands money at the equivalent of gunpoint; if the taxpayer refuses to pay, his assets are seized by force, and if he should resist such depredation, he will be arrested or shot if he should continue to resist.
8. Production: Entrepreneurship and Change
2. Determination of the Discounted Marginal Value Product
3. The Source of Factor Incomes
Our analysis permits us now to resolve that time-honored controversy in economics: Which is the source of wages—capital or consumption? Or, as we should rephrase it, which is the source of original-factor incomes (for labor and land factors)? It is clear that the ultimate goal of the investment of capital is future consumption. In that sense, consumption is the necessary requisite without which there would be no capital.
4. Land and Capital Goods
The price of the unit service of every factor, then, is equal to its discounted marginal value product. This is true of all factors, whether they be “original” (land and labor) or “produced” (capital goods). However, as we have seen, there is no net income to the owners of capital goods, since their prices contain the prices of the various factors that co-operate in their production. Essentially, then, net income accrues only to owners of land and labor factors and to capitalists for their “time” services.
5. Capitalization and Rent
The subject of “rent” is one of the most confused in the entire economic literature. We must, therefore, reiterate the meaning of rent as set forth above. We are using “rent” to mean the unit price of the services of any good. It is important to banish any preconceptions that apply the concept of rent to land only.
