[Excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (1995). An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]
A German company, Nordex, is expanding—in Jonesboro, Arkansas. The company plans to hire up to 700 Americans at above-average wages. I haven’t heard any conservatives denounce the action of Nordex.
In the foreground is the Keynesian fiction, in which consumption plus investment (plus government spending) equals output. In the background is the Austrian reality, in which a heterogeneous capital stock responds to changes in the interest rate by shifts in the time structure of production. Intervention in credit markets thus creates distortions that generate the business cycle. See Roger Garrison, Austrian Macroeconomics: A Diagrammatical Exposition (Mises Institute, 2010 forthcoming)
Rasmussen reports that 75% of people polled say that the free market is better than government management.
Microsoft is slowly dying as a consumer brand. As recently as five or six years ago, though, left liberals and other anti-business ideologues were still making comments about how Microsoft was a monopoly that was crushing competition in the market place.
[Excerpted from An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (1995). An MP3 audio file of this article, read by Jeff Riggenbach, is available for download.]
In 1824, the Spitalfields Act of wage control for silk weavers was repealed after being in force for 50 years. The act was essentially a disaster that devastated the industry and the workers.
