What is the “means of production” and what significance does it have to society? How is it created, expanded, or merely sustained? What is the relationship between the prevailing moral order of a society and its accumulation of capital?
On pages 33–35 of my book Socialism, Economic Calculation, and Entrepreneurship, I examine the process by which the division of practical entrepreneurial knowledge deepens “vertically” and expands “horizontally,” a process that permits (and at the same time requires) an increase in population, fosters prosperity and general well-being, and brings about the advancement of civilization. As I indicate there, this process is based on
The British Olympic organizers restricted ticket purchases, rewarded corporate purchases but not corporate use, imposed price controls on tickets available to the public and state violence against the resulting scalpers (touts) — and are distraught and surprised over the empty seats that characterize so many of the Olympic events so far.
Volume 15, no. 2 of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics was made available online this week. Articles are:
Nicolai J. Foss, “The Continuing Relevance of Austrian Capital Theory,”
Lucas Engelhardt, “Expansionary Monetary Policy and Decreasing Entrepreneurial Quality,”
“They are not spotless children living in some never-never land of innocence and eternal stasis. They are thinking, calculating humans who would like a bit of material progress.”
The state is at its most arrogant when it tries to protect us from ourselves. And there is perhaps no group of people subjected to a more absurd policy of state “protection” than the Jarawa tribe of India. They are confined to a reserve and forbidden to interact with outsiders, ostensibly for their own good.
“It must be added that the theory of land ownership in a free society set forth here, i.e., first ownership by the first user, has nothing in common with another superficially similar theory of land ownership—advanced by J.K. Ingalls and his disciples in the late nineteenth century. Ingalls advocated continuing ownership only for actual occupiers and personal users of the land. This is in contrast to original ownership by the first user.”
