Praxeology - economics - provides no ultimate ethical judgments: it simply furnishes the indispensable data necessary to make such judgments. Common criticisms of the free market are refuted praxeologically in this chapter. Absolute equality is an impossible goal.
Price controls, product controls, compulsory cartels, licenses, standards, tariffs, child labor laws, conscription, minimum wage laws, subsidies, penalties, anti-trust, conservation laws, patents, public utilities, eminent domain, and bribery are among the many triangular interventions by government that distort markets and reduce benefits to con
Progressive, proportional and regressive taxes. Rothbard is relentlessly not in favor of taxes. The state robs both rich and poor.
This completes the study of money and of the effects of changes in monetary relations on the economic system. Like all commodities, money has its own supply and demand and price: purchasing power. Everyone deals in money.
Walter Block met Rothbard in 1966. Here, Block tells a joke making the point that antitrust law is dead from the neck up. There is nothing wrong with a monopoly price. Whatever price the free market establishes will be the best price.
How are money prices determined? The stock of the money commodity responds to demand and supply of the consumers and their preferences just as with any other good.
Austrian Economics offers an elegant, logical, and thoroughly causal explanation of how money came to be, again demonstrating the power of the free
Rothbard's approach to money prices is not as a barter exchange system. Instead, he made money prices the common denominator for all exchange ratios. You can now engage in economic calculation.
Building the world’s tallest building has been a matter of particularly bad timing by entrepreneurs.
The mental constructs of the evenly rotating economy and of specific factors of production are discussed. Distinguishing between interest and profits and a construct of slow change are revealed through the ERE as Rothbard considers the final state of rest.The ERE construct is simply a useful, unrealizable, mental tool.
Direct exchange was limited. The pattern of indirect exchange led to the common medium of exchange: money. Maximization of psychic income always leads the seller of a good to seek the highest money price for it, and the buyer of a good to seek the lowest money price.
Here Rothbard deals with the pure rate of interest, as determined by time preference. It's a ratio of prices between present and future goods. The interest rate is equal to the rate of price spread in the various stages of production. It pervades all time markets.
Entrepreneurs see the future better than others and go and make money off it. Profits are an index that maladjustments are being met and combatted by the profit-making entrepreneurs. Capital does not beget profits. Only wise entrepreneurial decisions do that.
This middle chapter on production theory goes into detail on factor pricing and discounted marginal value product. The way Rothbard developed every aspect of production theory is unique. As the economy becomes more specialized and complex, the importance of this market process becomes greater.
Leading Austrian Economists discuss Henry Hazlitt's classic book Economics in One Lesson. Interview 1 of 12.
From The Case Against The Fed (pp. 20-27), as narrated by Floy Lilley.
From The Case Against The Fed (pp. 45-54), as narrated by Floy Lilley.
