"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...
Economics
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Natural Economic Law Can’t Be Repealed
by Sheldon Richman | Dec 12, 2024 | Blog, Economics
If the government restricts supply and subsidizes demand, out-of-control prices, resource shortages, and unpleasant ad hoc coping restrictions will follow. That is the natural (economic) law. The government cannot repeal it. But it can stop its attempt to plan.