has government been wiser in the use of resources than the market system driven by competitive pressure to keep costs down? In fact, government plays a purely are working with the courts to slice up the company, supposedly to create competition but actually to reward Microsoft’s competitors. Is there anyone who truly the great toilet tank fiasco. In a little-noticed law passed in 1992— the Energy Policy and Conservation Act Congress mandated that all future toilets installed in
across the political spectrum are fretting about the need for a national energy policy, wringing their hands about the apparent un-American-ness of our dependence on separate the good ideas from the bad. Scholars like F.A. Hayek have referred to “competition as a discovery procedure,” and in an article that appeared in the
and high-tech and low-tech firms is best for economic growth; I prefer to let competition in free markets sort it out. NU: What drives entrepreneurs to build great particular areas or activities for an entrepreneurial boost have fallen flat. The policy environment should also allow the “freedom to fail” — no bailouts and
approach to economic analysis. Instead, modern microeconomics depicts a competitive equilibrium as the benchmark for economic efficiency, and analyzes how economic policy can move an economy toward that equilibrium. This is done by correcting innovative firms and slowing economic progress. In macroeconomics, stabilization policies work against progress by using monetary policy to interfere with price
for centralized power! Table 1 lists just a few of the results of these policies, and it explains why the presidential candidates are all about the include the fact that prices actually do adjust downward—rigidities are rare in competitive markets and more common in regulated ones. So if markets are not clearing that such demand-side policies themselves became sticky, entrenched as Keynesian policy institutions. While much of economics as a science has moved on from Keynesian
urge the Federal Reserve System to lower interest rates and follow an easy money policy, they do not openly declare that they are pro-inflation. Yet, there is no way larger issues of inflation, nor do they address the ultimate consequences of such policies. Likewise, we hear advocates of government regulation extolling the virtues as a tool to promote politically-favored monopolies and to strangle economic competition. One thing that made the new American colonies favorable places to live
dispersion of ownership diffused power over the corporation and prevented serious competition for management. Pickens was just such a competitor who discovered there is one of the products offered by the securities markets. How can it be government policy to promote a product? The direct benefits from high levels of trading go to
we’re told, are the very foundation of the economy and thus cannot be subject to competitive pressure or to changes in consumer demand. Butchers and bakers can go This agitation led to congressional enactment of more and more centralized policies, culminating in passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. Modeled after Interstate Commerce Commission—the Fed eliminated “cutthroat” banking competition, often denounced as “wildcat banking.” This way the larger more
standards, set by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), there is no competition in this role. One set of rules often gets imposed, to the exclusion of earnings. A much simpler solution would be for Congress to repeal its perverse tax policies that penalize executive salaries and encourage the over-use of options. If
incentive systems, executive compensation, product development, and financial policies. Labor relations are also regulated by politicians, and contrary to popular generate accounting losses. The incentives associated with private property and competitive markets generate a superior performance because private survival is trade with the Pacific rim is constrained, if not threatened, by U.S. government policies that are the consequences of its own nationalized enterprises. Few realize
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.