Reading Don Lavoie and Emily Chamlee-Wright’s Culture and Enterprise, I was struck by the following percipient and eloquent observation by Chinese historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien (c.145-86 BC), over two thousand years ago, regarding the coordinating capacity of the market process:
I remember when I was at Walter Block’s excellent Radical Austrianism, Radical Libertarianism seminar last summer, someone asked him if being an Austrian led people to become libertarians. Specifically, they were wondering how someone could not adopt libertarian views on something like the minimum wage once they understood the actual economic effects of it. Dr. Block’s reply was to the effect that he supposed you could be a rather unpleasant person, and support the minimum wage because you thought it was good for certain groups of people to be unemployed.
In my last article, “How Government Budget Deficits Reduce Wages and Raise Profits”, I explained why those who complain about profits rising at the expense of wages should not blame the free market but, in part at least, the growth in government budget deficits. I’d now like to show that in addition they should blame the environmental movement and the government intervention that it has inspired.
In recent years there have been growing complaints over slow growth in wages compared to profits. Those who make the complaints usually offer little in the way of explanation. Here is a part of the explanation: growing government budget deficits.
