Category: Economic Theory
The analysis published under this category are as follows.
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
The American Economy is Not a Free-Market Economy / Economics / Economic Theory
By: MISES
Those of us who favor the free market must confront a problem. The virtues of the market, and the vices of socialism and interventionism, have been made incontestably clear by Mises, Rothbard, Hazlitt and others. The case for the free market, as these great figures explain it, can readily be grasped and demands no esoteric knowledge. Yet many academics reject the market. They condemn capitalism for leaving many in poverty and for glaring inequalities. How can so many academics fail to grasp what seem to us obvious truths?
Monday, September 23, 2013
Fear the Boom, Not the Bust / Economics / Economic Theory
By: MISES
Frank Hollenbeck writes: If you listen to TV commentators, you’ve been told the worst is behind us. Growth is picking up, and Europe is coming out of its slumber. No one seems to be concerned that this tepid below-2-percent growth is being entirely fed by the central bank’s massive money printing. It’s a “growth at any price” policy. How quickly we forget.
Sunday, September 22, 2013
Intellectual Property is Not True Property / Companies / Economic Theory
By: MISES
David D'Amato writes: As the legal melee between Apple and Samsung continues, the “patent wars” are again front-page news. During August of this year, the International Trade Commission, successor to the Progressive Era-founded Tariff Commission, announced that Samsung can no longer import into the U.S. certain mobile devices. The Commission found that the subject products infringe on a number of Apple’s patents, but the president may still veto its decision regarding importation. As it happens, when the reverse scenario came about in June, and the Commission banned Apple from importing products infringing on Samsung patents, Obama did wield his veto. The legal and political drama at hand is just the latest installment in an ongoing string of lawsuits aimed at protecting, in the words of The New Yorker’s Nicholas Thompson, “patents that are often either inscrutable or mundane.”
Thursday, September 19, 2013
The End Of Economics And The Last (Stock)Man / Politics / Economic Theory
By: Andrew_McKillop
DENY AND OBLITERATE HISTORY
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their understanding of their own history.” ~ George Orwell.
In George Orwell‘s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”, written in 1948, the Ministry of Truth is responsible for all needed falsification of historical events, and the obliteration of all preceding interpretation of these events.
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Wednesday, September 18, 2013
The Need for a New Economics / Economics / Economic Theory
By: John_Mauldin
In today's Outside the Box, my good friend George Gilder, the well-known techno-utopian, attempts with some success to turn economics on its ear. "The economy is not chiefly an incentive system," he asserts, "it is an information system." And information, truly understood, is about the introduction of novelty, or "surprise," into a system. In the case of the economy, it's about invention and entrepreneurship. The new information that is injected gets converted into knowledge; and thus, says George, it is accumulated knowledge, rather than money or material, that constitutes true wealth.
And thus the economy is driven not so much by powerful people and institutions wielding the levers of the economic machine as it is by the ever-increasing power of information and knowledge. Economists and the governments they work for often appear to prefer a deterministic, no-surprises (and too-big-to-fail) economy, but that way lies economic stagnation. If determinism worked, socialism would have thrived.
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Sunday, September 15, 2013
Understanding the Cancer Stage of Capitalism / Politics / Economic Theory
By: Global_Research
Giorgio Baruchello writes: Review of John McMurtry‘s Book - While US President Barack Obama bangs loud drums of war, the Pope (the first of the Catholic Church to choose the name of Francis) accuses “the great ones of the earth [to] want to solve” the world’s crises “with a war… Because, for them, money is more important than people! And war is just that: it is an act of faith in money, in idols” (“Pope Francis: War is the suicide of humanity”, Vatican Radio, 2 June 2013).
The Church of Rome itself rejects “the magic of the market” and it sees that the “invisible hand” has got fingers that pull triggers.
Sunday, September 01, 2013
Savings Glut vs. Low Interest Rates / Economics / Economic Theory
By: David_Howden
Five years after the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, economists are still starkly divided as to its causes. Perhaps this is not too surprising as we are now more than 80 years past the Great Depression with little end in sight to the debate surrounding the causes of that downturn.
Most economists fall into one of two camps when explaining where the imbalances originated that led up to the current crisis. Austrian School economists are in the unique position of being able to reconcile these two camps, even while favoring the first explanation to the second.
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Monday, August 26, 2013
Debt, Inflation and Economy - Trying To Stay Sane In An Insane World / Economics / Economic Theory
By: James_Quinn
In Part 1 of this article I documented the insane remedies prescribed by the mad banker scientists presiding over this preposterous fiat experiment since they blew up the lab in 2008. In Part 2 I tried to articulate why the country has allowed itself to be brought to the brink of catastrophe. There is no turning back time. The choices we've made and avoided making over the last one hundred years are going to come home to roost over the next fifteen years. We are in the midst of a great Crisis that will not be resolved until the mid-2020s. The propagandists supporting the vested interests continue to assure the voluntarily oblivious populace the economy is improving, jobs are plentiful, inflation is under control, and housing is recovering. Bernanke and his band of merry money manipulators, Obama and his gaggle of government apparatchiks, and their mendacious mainstream media mouthpieces have enacted radical measures in the last five years that reek of desperation in their effort to give the appearance of revival to a failing economic system. Stimulating the net worth of bankers and connected corporate cronies through engineered stock market gains has not trickled down to the peasants. Our owners try to convince us it's raining, but we know they're pissing down our backs. Our Crisis mood is congealing.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Economic Future - The Blip! / Economics / Economic Theory
By: John_Mauldin
This week's Outside the Box does not make me feel good, but author Benjamin Wallace-Wells does explain Robert Gordon’s views better than anyone I have seen. (And of course the whole point of Outside the Box is to yank us out of our comfort zones from time to time.)
Dr. Robert Gordon is a professor of economics who has held a named chair at Northwestern University for decades; but as the author of this piece says, "[T]he scope of his bleakness has given him, over the past year, a newfound public profile." Gordon offers us two key predictions, both discomfiting. The first pertains to the near future, when, he says, our economy will grow at less than half its average rate over the last century because of a whole raft of structural headwinds.
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Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Socialism - Appeasing Envy / Politics / Economic Theory
By: Henry_Hazlitt
Any attempt to equalize wealth or income by forced redistribution must only tend to destroy wealth and income. Historically the best the would-be equalizers have ever succeeded in doing is to equalize downward. This has even been caustically described as their intention. “Your levellers,” said Samuel Johnson in the mid-eighteenth century, “wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.”
And in our own day we find even an eminent liberal like the late Mr. Justice Holmes writing: “I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.”[1]
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Sunday, July 21, 2013
Inflation or Deflation? / Economics / Economic Theory
By: John_Mauldin
By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method, they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some. The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls . . . become 'profiteers', who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished not less than the proletariat. As the inflation proceeds . . . all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless…. – John Maynard Keynes
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Market Monopoly Through Austrian Economics Lenses / Economics / Economic Theory
By: MISES
Jonathan Newman writes: A recent 60 Minutes piece by Lesley Stahl cut into an extremely urgent problem of our day: expensive sunglasses. The report identified a possible monopoly in the market for glasses, a firm called Luxottica, which owns almost all the leading brands of eyewear, four large retailers of glasses, and even a popular vision insurance provider.
Stahl interviewed the CEO of Luxottica, Andrea Guerra, and questioned his business practices, the prices of his products, and Luxottica’s growth over the years. At times, she almost seemed to scold the successful CEO for, well, being so successful.
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Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Current U.S. Economic Climate According to The Prince of Darkness / Economics / Economic Theory
By: John_Mauldin
As long-time readers know, I have a very eclectic group of friends and associates. Colorful, opinionated, generally both fun and funny, they make for interesting times and discussions wherever I go. I am not certain why they associate with such a mild-mannered, soft-spoken, Muddle-Through Texan like me, but most agree that I am at least good for comic relief. Next week I will be in the midst of some unabashed bulls, but today I offer up for your reading pleasure a note from a friend who is on the Dark Side of the fence, though he is hardly what you could call a conventional bear. He is Rich Yamarone, Chief Economist for Bloomberg.
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Without Knowledge of the Past There is No Future / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Submissions
Wim Grommen writes: Current problems associated with the end of the third industrial revolution
Humanity is being confronted with the same problems as those at the end of the second industrial revolution such as decreasing stock exchange rates, highly increasing unemployment, towering debts of companies and governments and bad financial positions of banks. Every production phase or civilization or other human invention goes through a so called transformation process, a transition.
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Sunday, June 23, 2013
Keynes And The Cult Of Economic Doom / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Andrew_McKillop
FERGUSON APOLOGIZES
Iconic history don and bestselling author Niall Ferguson apologised "unreservedly" for "stupid and tactless" remarks in which he implied that John Maynard Keynes did not care about future generations – “in the long run we are all dead” - because Keynes was a childless homosexual. As we know to our present and future cost, Keynes was more concerned about ultra low short-term interest rates and vast government handouts, financed by borrowing. Ferguson claims his disagreement with Keynes, his opposition to deficit spending and the economic philosophy called “Keynesianism” was nothing to do with Keynes' sexual orientation. Ferguson said his real point was: “The point I had made in my presentation was that in the long run our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive and will have to deal with the consequences of our economic actions." On that score we can only agree.
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Is GDP Economic Growth a Hoax? What are they Hiding? / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Sam_Chee_Kong
There is always an assurance from our Government that the economy is doing fine, jobs are recovering, wages are going up and prices are under control. We are never been told what actually happened behind the scene or problems our economy is facing. Through propaganda by the media we are persuaded that everything is in the safe hands of the Government.
Even when economies around us are collapsing we are led to believe that our economy is the strongest, our share market is the best performing, our economic fundamentals are the best or in short we are the best managed economy. We are given the impression that our economy is ‘invincible and different from others’. But the problem is whether our economy is living up to what was preached by our Government. Is there a way to gauge the real performance of our economy other than relying on figures published by them?
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Sunday, June 16, 2013
Revenge of the Minsky Moment, Economists Are Still Clueless / Economics / Economic Theory
By: John_Mauldin
Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again. - John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform
There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance. Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of those who do not have insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present. - John Kenneth Galbraith
Hitler must have been rather loosely educated, not having learned the lesson of Napoleon's autumn advance on Moscow. - Sir Winston Churchill
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Wednesday, June 12, 2013
The Risk of Government Economic Policies and the Rationing of Retirement / Economics / Economic Theory
By: John_Mauldin
In addition to our own, there is another conference I normally go to every spring; but sadly, I missed it this year. Rob Arnott of Research Affiliates indulges me and lets me attend the annual Research Affiliates Advisory Panel he conducts at some exclusive location (usually but not always) in Southern California, in close proximity to one or more fabulous gourmet establishments. And he is an oenophile of the first rank, a pastime that at one time in my life was a huge attraction. I now just live vicariously when he orders wine.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
The Nonsense Behind State Economic Intervention / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Alasdair_Macleod
Both Keynesians and monetarists believe that increased government spending, or more money injected into the economy, is sometimes necessary. The intervention is in the form of unfunded government spending, artificially low interest rates to boost demand for money and bank credit, or a drive to make the currency “competitive” by lowering it. These methods have been tried unsuccessfully time and again, and they must be denounced if we are to understand our true economic condition.
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Friday, May 31, 2013
Euro-zone Keynesian Economic Dogmatism / Economics / Economic Theory
By: Andy_Sutton
Lest I be accused of picking on US-centered media outlets, we’re going to spend a bit of time this week dissecting a Eurozone Reuters article which puts on full display the completely absurd rationale of the Keynesian economic model. This folks is truly the stinker of the year (so far) right here. Unfortunately, it also lays bare the dogmatic nature of economic thinking. It should be no surprise really; the same dogmatism exists in the political and religious arenas as well. Dogmatism was once explained to me as ‘clinging to a particular belief or beliefs in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary’. While this is not the ‘official’ Webster’s definition, it makes the most sense to the average person and is very fitting for this discussion.