Sheldon Richman | The Libertarian Institute

TGIF: More on Menger and Value

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 25, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Consumer goods are also called finished goods. The products we buy at the supermarket and other retail stores have, in less finished form, passed through many stages (including distribution), reaching back to the original factors of production: land and labor. Land includes anything nature-given and not produced. We think of those things as natural resources, but as Julian Simon taught us, it takes human ingenuity to convert nature-given stuff, which may have no apparent value for human well-being, into a resource that makes our lives better. (See Simon's invaluable The Ultimate Resource 2.)...

The Public-School Chickens Come Home Again

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 23, 2025 | Blog, Justice, Libertarianism

In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether parents of children in government schools have a constitutional right to opt out of programs that "expose" their kids to LGBTQ materials. Once again, the chickens have come home to roost. By that, I mean that if politicians, bureaucrats, and elected boards did not run schools and force (tax) parents and nonparents to finance them, this problem could not arise. This should not be an issue for the political system, and you need not be an anarchist to see it. Free people are capable of educating or buying education for their...

TGIF: Menger on Trade

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 18, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Even when a line on a map separates two individuals, trade is still trade—that is, mutually beneficial cooperation. Whether the line separates towns, cities, counties, states, or countries, it does not matter. The transactions are win-win. We could do quite well without the categories of exports and imports. Adam Smith wisely said almost 250 years ago that the balance-of-trade doctrine was "absurd." In a sense, only two kinds of goods and services exist as far as I'm concerned: those that I produce and those that everyone else produces. That is true for you too. Countries don't trade....

TGIF: The Objectively Invaluable Menger

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 11, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Many people are uneasy with the free market. I think that's because they subscribe, implicitly if not explicitly, to the labor theory of value. Workers, people lament, seem not to reap the full and just reward for their labors. Belief in the labor theory puts adherents in good company. Adam Smith and his successor, David Ricardo, were labor theorists. Fédéric Bastiat held a variant of the labor theory. Of course, labor theorists are also in some bad company, like Karl Marx, a true enemy of the people in whose name hundreds of millions have been murdered. In fairness, it should be...

TGIF: The Great Carl Menger

by Sheldon Richman | Apr 4, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

There can be no doubt among competent historians that if ... the Austrian School has occupied an almost unique position in the development of economic science, this is entirely due to the foundations laid by this one man.... [I]ts fundamental ideas belong fully and wholly to [?].... [W]hat is common to the members of the Austrian School, what constitutes their peculiarity and provided the foundations for their later contributions is their acceptance of the teaching of [?]. —F. A. Hayek Who was Hayek writing about? Carl Menger, of course. Menger (1840-1921), a professor at the University of...

TGIF: “Liberalism and Capitalism”

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 28, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Ludwig von Mises's 1927 path-breaking work in political theory speaks to the current generations. In section 5 of his introduction to Liberalism: The Classical Tradition, Mises sounds impeccably relevant in describing how the opponents of liberalism and the market economy twist facts that are plainly before our eyes. You'll see how he refuted the absurd claim that capitalism serves only a tiny privileged and exploitative group. The work of most thinkers passes away soon after they do. Not so with Ludwig von Mises. He began the section by acknowledging what should be obvious. Governments have...

TGIF: The Income Stagnation Myth

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 21, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Many people, including some free-market advocates, think Americans are materially worse off today than they were in the 1970s. Some subscribers to that view blame globalization, that is, free trade in goods, which means in labor services. By any reasonable measure, those people are wrong. Stagnation is a myth. Living standards have never been higher. That goes for an increasing portion of the rest of the world too. After thousands of years, extreme poverty has plummeted to under 10 percent in just a few decades. This is all well documented. Trade specialist Daniel Griswold writes, This...

The Abduction of Mahmoud Khalil

by Sheldon Richman | Mar 16, 2025 | Blog

The Trump administration's abduction and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old green-card holder and permanent legal resident of the United States, is horrifying not just for him and his pregnant wife, a U.S. citizen, but as a sign of things to come. Khalil, who is a Syrian-born Algerian of Palestinian descent, has been detained pending deportation without being charged with any crime against persons or property, but because he engaged in speech and other peaceful activities on behalf of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. He was a graduate student at Columbia University at...