Paid and Unpaid Labor
The prohibition on “child labor” (or low-wage labor more generally) should be understood not as a prohibition on child labor as such but as a prohibition on certain types of child labor.
Defining the Extent of the Market: the Whole Foods Case
Anyone is a monopolist if the market is defined narrowly enough. McDonald’s is a monopoly provider of Big Macs, and Burger King is a monopoly provider of Whoppers. Tiger Woods plays in fewer golf tournaments than he used to. Should he prosecuted as a monopolistic withholder of his services?
Windfall Profits and That Which Is Not Seen
Market prices turn incomprehensibly complex relationships into very simple ones. Government policy does the opposite. It turns the simple into the extraordinarily complex, and, as Ludwig von Mises has argued in various places, government intervention in one aspect of the economy will displace resources, change prices, and likely lead to calls for government intervention in other areas of the economy.
Revisiting Ludwig von Mises’s Interventionism
I turn your attention to one of the shortest of Mises’s works: Interventionism: An Economic Analysis. It can be read in an evening. Mises offers solid evaluations and critiques of different types of interventionism.
Economists and the “Zimbabwe Solution”
It seems that the madness among at least some economists is not abating. Harvard University apparently is vying with Princeton to see who can create the most outrageous policy prescriptions. While Paul Krugman has been leading the pack, it is disheartening to see Greg Mankiw (who at one time made sense once in a while and was George W. Bush’s chief economic advisor) and also Kenneth Rogoff, the former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.
The Costs of Carbon Legislation
The real threat to humanity comes from governments growing ever more powerful in the name of fighting climate change. Whether you are a “denier” or whether you think carbon dioxide emissions need to be sharply reduced very quickly, you should be extremely skeptical of the process now unfolding in Washington. This isn’t about saving the planet; it’s about money and power.
White and Horwitz on Hoppe
The usually sensible Larry White recently blogged a silly and petty comment on Hans Hoppe’s Mises Daily Article “The Yield from Money Held’ Reconsidered.“
White quoted the following two (consecutive) paragraphs from Hoppe’s article:
Sad End to the Immigration Issue
To have an “immigration problem” is enormously flattering for a country. For that problem to go away is a dark cloud, a bad omen, a sign that something is going terribly wrong. The absence of an immigration problem can quickly turn into an emigration problem.
Can President Obama’s Policies Heal the US Economy?
Obama has adopted the approach of a patient and his doctor with respect to managing the US economy: deferring to the supposed experts. He is very much influenced by the ideas of Joseph Stiglitz, Larry Summers, and Paul Volcker. He also admires Robert Reich and Paul Krugman. Although he didn’t say it, he is also influenced by the ideas of Ben Bernanke.
The Social Security Scam
Parents don’t lay awake at night trying to figure out how to repay the money they loaned themselves. The government, however, thinks that it makes perfect sense to collect $100 of tax revenue, spend the $100, and then declare that it now owes itself $100. This scheme is not limited to Social Security. Currently, federal intragovernmental debt for all programs totals $4.3 trillion.
