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....
TGIF
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...
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...
TGIF: Social Cooperation Versus Violence
by Sheldon Richman | Dec 27, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
The chilling photo of a hooded man cold-bloodedly executing a health-insurance CEO on a busy New York City street should make any decent person pause and reflect. Anyone who even glimpses the role of social cooperation in making life better and longer felt sickened,...
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...
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...
TGIF: Supply Precedes Demand
by Sheldon Richman | Dec 6, 2024 | Economics, Featured Articles, Justice, Libertarianism, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
"Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production." —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776 "In the market economy the consumers are supreme. Their buying and their abstention from buying ultimately determine what the entrepreneurs produce and in what...
TGIF: On Fairness
by Sheldon Richman | Nov 29, 2024 | Economics, Justice, Politics, Sheldon Richman, TGIF
Fairness and its synonyms are among the most abused words in English. By that I mean they are commonly manipulated for ideological ends. Wokeness has aggravated a situation that has existed for some time. What better way to score points for a political position than...