George Reisman

The uniformity-of-profit principle describes a tendency, never an actually existing state of affairs.

Farm subsidies are a way the government achieves artificially high prices. They are an illustration of legal minimum prices—that is, prices below which the government prevents the producers from selling.

The operation of the tendency toward a uniform rate of profit requires that high profits be made by continuously introducing productive innovations in advance of competitors.

How the profit motive acts to make production steadily increase in a free market, and becomes an agent of continuous economic progress.

The real advocates of the consumers—their virtual agents—are businessmen seeking profit, not the leaders of groups trying to restrict the freedom of businessmen to earn profits.

In total opposition to the misguided efforts of the Marxists to contrast production for profit with “production for use,” the fact is that production for profit is production for use.

The uniformity-of-profit principle explains how the activities of all the separate business enterprises are harmoniously coordinated so that capital is not invested excessively in the production of some items while leaving the production of other items unprovided for.

The best way to begin to understand the functioning of the price system, and thus the full nature of the dependence of the division of labor on capitalism, is by understanding the following very simple and fundamental principle. Namely, there is a tendency in a free market toward the establishment of a uniform rate of profit on capital invested in all the different branches of industry.

The development of all the institutional features of capitalism is well illustrated by the economic history of the United States.

Economic progress is the leading manifestation of yet another major institutional feature of capitalism: the harmony of the rational self-interests of all men, in which the success of each promotes the well-being of all.

The existence of freedom under laissez-faire capitalism requires the existence of government.

The greatest era of capitalist development—the last two centuries—has taken place under the ongoing cultural influence of the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

Economics belongs alongside mathematics, natural science, history, philosophy, and the humanities as an integral part of a liberal education.

What makes the science of economics necessary and important is the fact that while human life and well-being depend on the production of wealth, and the production of wealth depends on the division of labor, the division of labor does not exist or function automatically.

Man’s nature makes him need wealth; his simplest percep­tions make him desire it; the problem, they held, is to produce it. Economic theory, therefore, could take for granted the desire to consume, and focus on the ways and means by which production might be increased.

One of the innumerable destructive consequences of an almost 250-year-old error in economic theory made by Adam Smith.