In recent years, many people, at least in certain circles, have become familiar with Bastiat’s broken-window fallacy and have come to recognize that Keynesian macroeconomic policy amounts to little more than this fallacy writ large.
Ryan McMaken provides an excellent response to the current the inequality is the root of evil nonsense.
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By Henry Hazlitt [ Chapter 14 of Economics in One Lesson.]
Saving the X Industry
Menger’s causal, realist approach to economics has been described as essentialist. Rather than building artificial models that mimic some attributes or outcomes of an economic process, Menger wanted to understand the essential characteristics of phenomena like value, price, and exchange.
Here is a short video that examines early forms of money such as metal and salt. Of special interest, it shows the transition from barter goods (such as axes) to transactions facilitated with miniature ax heads without handles or any use value. By creating miniature ax heads they created a money that was valuable and more divisible than the full size ax. By forming metal such as bronze into the form of a miniature ax head they alerted potential traders of its commodity value. This was a step towards coined money.
Progressives — who religiously believe in the holiness and sanctity of the State — are forever lecturing the rest of us about capitalist “greed.” The capitalists, they tell us, have no compassion and no decency; they are interested only in money and will walk over anyone to get it.
In this video, Dr. Boyd Blundell takes me on in a debate on minimum wage.
American politicians, while taking oaths to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” for the most part despise the document and its restrictions upon their behavior. The few politicians who do take the law seriously – like former Rep. Ron Paul – generally are despised by their colleagues and mocked for their fealty to both the spirit and letter of the Constitution.
