Wages, Unemployment, and Inflation

Our economic system—the market economy or cap­italism—is a system of consumers’ supremacy. The customer is sovereign; he is, says a popular slogan, “always right.” Businessmen are under the neces­sity of turning out what the consumers ask for and they must sell their wares at prices which the con­sumers can afford and are prepared to pay. A busi­ness operation is a manifest failure if the proceeds from the sales do not reimburse the businessman for all he has expended in producing the article.

Our Republic’s First Economist

On the fourth of July we pay homage to our Founding Fathers — the men who gave us our freedom. One of the greatest of these 18th century “giants” was our Nation’s first economist, Pelatiah Webster.

Webster was more than an economist. He was also an ordained minister, a preacher, a teacher, a merchant, and statesman. He understood, more than most men of his day and most men since, the interrelationship of moral and economic law.

Pelatiah Webster

Pelatiah Webster was a Philadelphia merchant, and author of a number of pamphlets on finances and government.

Böhm-Bawerk vs. the Neoclassical School

In general the neoclassical school has followed a tradition which predated the subjectivist revolution and involves a productive system in which the different factors of production give rise, in a homogeneous and horizontal manner, to consumer goods and services. No thought whatsoever is given to the immersion of these factors in time and space throughout a temporal structure of productive stages, an aspect Austrian theorists typically do take into account.

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