I’ve seen a couple of exhortations to boycott Black Friday. I completely agree with critics of the consumer economy that consumption does not create economic growth, there is far more to life than material consumption, holiday spending has gotten excessive, etc., etc. Still, some are calling for boycotts of major retailers because they “ruin workers’ holidays.” The boycotters are off base for two reasons.
Almost all contemporary economists, except for Austrian economists, persist in analyzing the performance of the market economy using the model of “perfect competition.” Many of these economists go even further and use this hypothetical fictional construct as a normative standard for judging the performance of real-world market economies. They label as “market failures” huge firms, differentiated products, vigorous price competition, and promotional advertisng, because these market phenomena do not conform to the outcomes specified by the perfectly competitive model.
[The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (1956)]
From the very beginnings of the socialist movement and the endeavors to revive the interventionist policies of the precapitalistic ages, both socialism and interventionism were utterly discredited in the eyes of those conversant with economic theory. But the ideas of the revolutionaries and reformers found approval with the immense majority of ignorant people exclusively driven by the most powerful human passions of envy and hatred.
I spent part of this afternoon at my neighborhood Starbucks, where I was working on a project. As I finished up, I saw that I had a message from my wife asking me to swing by the store to pick up half a gallon of skim milk. No problem. I generally use self-checkout, but sometimes it’s a roll of the dice. This evening, I rolled the dice and lost: one of the checkout lanes malfunctioned as the person in front of me was using it, and the customers at the other self-checkout for which I was in line were having trouble with the bill acceptor.
The United States government has just crossed the magic line where its total national debt now exceeds (more than 100%) of GDP.
See here that the U.S. national debt of $15.033 trillion is now higher than the $15.032 trillion gross domestic product. The magic line usually means that a country is plunging into a long term malaise. There are other ways of calculating debt and GDP, but it is still not a pretty picture.
I wrote an extra Forbes piece last night in response to police brutality at UC-Davis and elsewhere. There’s an irony here: my guess is that a lot of the people Scarcity and self-interest are constraints. Munger on Burke: the thing itself is the abuse.
It is true that in his popular writings during the 1950s, Mises occasionally acquiesced in using a version of the conventional pre-Keynesian definition of inflation as an increase in the quantity of money that was not offset by an increase in the demand for money resulting in a rise in overall prices or decline in the purchasing power of money.
