Sheldon Richman | The Libertarian Institute

TGIF: The H-1B Controversy

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 17, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

Does anyone still believe that the market process should set prices, including wages? Apparently not. Take the controversy surrounding the H-1B visa, the program that "permits" employers to hire highly educated and skilled foreign workers, such as hi-tech personnel. Judging by the narrow range, everyone involved in the debate is a social engineer. Only three options are on the menu: continue the program, reform it to prevent its misuse, and end it. What's missing? The "let the market set wages" option Sorry, that's not on offer. Let's start with how the U.S. Department of Labor describes the...

Production Is Spiritual, Not Material

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 14, 2025 | Blog, Economics

"Production is not an act of creation; it does not bring about something that did not exist before. It is a transformation of given elements through arrangement and combination. The producer is not a creator. Man is creative only in thinking and in the realm of imagination. In the world of external phenomena he is only a transformer. All that he can accomplish is to combine the means available in such a way that according to the laws of nature the result aimed at is bound to emerge.... "Only the human mind that directs action and production is creative. The mind too appertains to the...

TGIF: Efficient Bureaucracy?

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 10, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

With all the talk about government efficiency, it would be useful to remind ourselves why bureaucracies differ radically from for-profit businesses. Ludwig von Mises devoted a short but enlightening volume to this subject in 1944, Bureaucracy. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who will co-chair the nongovernmental Department of Government Efficiency, should do some homework by reading that book. Mises, as an advocate of limited government, did not argue that bureaucracy has no place in a free society. In contrast to anarcho-capitalists, he thought government and therefore some bureaucracy was...

Competition Is Cooperation

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 4, 2025 | Blog, Economics

"The pricing process is a social process. It is consummated by an interaction of all members of the society. All collaborate and cooperate, each in the particular role he has chosen for himself in the framework of the division of labor. Competing in cooperation and cooperating in competition all people are instrumental in bringing about the result, viz., the price structure of the market, the allocation of the factors of production to the various lines of want-satisfaction, and the determination of the share of each individual. These three events are not three different matters. They are...

TGIF: Capitalist Exploitation or Interest?

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 3, 2025 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Sheldon Richman, TGIF

The completely just proposition that the worker is to receive the entire value of his product can be reasonably interpreted to mean either that he is to receive the full present value of his product now or that he is to get the entire future value in the future. But ... the socialists interpret it to mean that the worker is to receive the entire future value of his product now. —Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk The free-market economy—laissez-faire capitalism—may be unpopular because people think it authorizes the exploitation of workers. They are not paid the full value of their product—or so it...

Crucial Economic Calculation

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 3, 2025 | Blog, Economics

"The advocates of totalitarianism consider 'capitalism' a ghastly evil, an awful illness that came upon mankind. In the eyes of Marx it was an inevitable stage of mankind’s evolution, but for all that the worst of evils; fortunately salvation is imminent and will free man forever from this disaster. In the opinion of other people it would have been possible to avoid capitalism if only men had been more moral or more skillful in the choice of economic policies. All such lucubrations have one feature in common. They look upon capitalism as if it were an accidental phenomenon which could be...

Which Came First: The Individual or the Group?

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 2, 2025 | Blog, Economics

"It is illusory to believe that it is possible to visualize collective wholes. They are never visible; their cognition is always the outcome of the understanding of the meaning which acting men attribute to their acts. We can see a crowd, i.e., a multitude of people. Whether this crowd is a mere gathering or a mass (in the sense in which this term is used in contemporary psychology) or an organized body or any other kind of social entity is a question which can only be answered by understanding the meaning which they themselves attach to their presence. And this meaning is always the meaning...

The Socialist Spirit

by Sheldon Richman | Jan 1, 2025 | Blog, Economics

"Of course, not Marxists alone, but most of those who emphatically declare themselves anti-Marxists, think entirely on Marxist lines and have adopted Marx’s arbitrary, unconfirmed and easily refutable dogmas. If and when they come into power, they govern and work entirely in the socialist spirit." —Ludwig von Mises, Socialism, Preface to 2nd German edition