Is Medicare a good program, financially speaking, for ordinary working people? Medicare Part A (the part that’s funded by payroll taxes) spent $394.6 billion in 2024 for the approximately sixty million of the over 65-years-of-age Americans on Medicare Part A (about...
Economics
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
Production for Profit Is Production for People, part 2
by Sheldon Richman | Dec 31, 2024 | Blog, Economics
"In his capacity as a businessman a man is a servant of the consumers, bound to comply with their wishes. He cannot indulge in his own whims and fancies. But his customers’ whims and fancies are for him ultimate law, provided these customers are ready to pay for them....