Sheldon Richman | The Libertarian Institute

TGIF: The Unfortunately Forgotten Sumner

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 20, 2024 | Economics, Justice, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Some things haven't changed since 1883. In that year Yale University professor William Graham Sumner, the anti-imperialist laissez-faire liberal and pioneer of American sociology, noticed that "we are told every day that great social problems stand before us and demand a solution, and we are assailed by oracles, threats, and warnings in reference to those problems." Then, as now, self-styled progressives announced that the sky would fall unless the problem that had most recently caught their fancy was addressed once by the government. Adam Smith's observation that "there is a great deal of...

The Welfare-State Paradox

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 19, 2024 | Blog, Economics, Politics

"Whether ... a system of social security is a good or a bad policy is essentially a political problem. One may try to justify it by declaring that the wage earners lack the insight and the moral strength to provide spontaneously for their own future. But then it is not easy to silence the voices of those who ask whether it is not paradoxical to entrust the nation’s welfare to the decisions of voters whom the law itself considers incapable of managing their own affairs; whether it is not absurd to make those people supreme in the conduct of government who are manifestly in need of a guardian...

The Steady Rise in Living Standards

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 18, 2024 | Blog, Economics

"The history of capitalism as it has operated in the last two hundred years in the realm of Western civilization is the record of a steady rise in the wage earners’ standard of living. The inherent mark of capitalism is that it is mass production for mass consumption directed by the most energetic and far-sighted individuals, unflaggingly aiming at improvement. Its driving force is the profit-motive the instrumentality of which forces the businessman constantly to provide the consumers with more, better, and cheaper amenities. An excess of profits over losses can appear only in a progressing...

Mises on Wages under Capitalism

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 17, 2024 | Blog, Economics

"While daily experience taught impressively that under capitalism real wage rates and the wage earners’ standard of living were steadily rising, while it became from day to day more obvious that the traditional walls separating the various strata of the population could no longer be preserved because the social improvement in the conditions of the industrial workers demolished the vested ideas of social rank and dignity, ... doctrinaires announced that old customs and social convention determine the height of wage rates. Only people blinded by preconceived prejudices and party bias could...

Economics Is about Individual Choice

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 16, 2024 | Blog, Economics

"The light which the economic theorist can throw on an economic process, or on the outcome of such a process, is viewed as deriving from his ability to relate back the process to the individual acts of choice of which the process is made up. Through the theorist’s understanding of the decisions made by individuals, and of the way in which these decisions have mutual impact upon one another, and become mutually adjusted to one another, he is able to 'explain' the course of economic events, and to understand the probable results that will follow from given exogenous changes operating on the...

How Far We’ve Come

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 15, 2024 | Blog, Economics

"The conditions under which modern man of the capitalist West must act are different from those under which his primitive ancestors lived and acted. As a result of the providential care of our forebears we have at our disposal an ample stock of intermediate products (capital goods or produced factors of production) and of consumers’ goods. Our activities are designed for a longer period of provision because we are the lucky heirs of a past which has lengthened, step by step, the period of provision and has bequeathed to us the means to expand the waiting period. In acting we are concerned...

The Vulnerable Capitalist

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 14, 2024 | Blog, Economics

"Popular literature attributes enormous 'power' to the capitalist and considers his owning a mass of capital goods as of enormous significance, giving him a great advantage over other people in the economy. We see, however, that this is far from the case; indeed, the opposite may well be true. For the capitalist has already saved from possible consumption and hired the services of factors to produce his capital goods. The owners of these factors have the money already for which they otherwise would have had to save and wait (and bear uncertainty), while the capitalist has only a mass of...

TGIF: “Corporate” Is Not a Four-Letter Word

by Sheldon Richman | Dec 13, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles, History, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

I rise today to protest the widespread and malicious use of the adjective corporate as a synonym for evil, corrupt, exploitative, or any number of other pejoratives. As a descriptor, corporate merely says that an association that makes or sells goods for profit is publicly registered as a corporation. (Nonprofits can be corporations too.) This distinguishes the association from sole proprietorships and partnerships. That in turn means the participants in the association have agreed contractually to do business and raise capital in particular ways. Its ownership shares are readily tradeable;...