Your building your own deck would be worthwhile only if your cost of doing so is less than the cost of having someone else, such as Jones, build it for you.
MARKETS
Intellectual freedom cannot exist without political freedom; political freedom cannot exist without economic freedom; a free mind and a free market are corollaries. – AYN RAND
Jean-Baptiste Say: An Economist in Troubled Times
To consume, men must first produce.
The Four Phases of the Great Depression
The Great Depression was not one, but four consecutive depressions that Professor Hans Sennholz has labeled as four “phases”: the business cycle; the disintegration of the world economy; the New Deal; and the Wagner Act.
A Financial History of Edinburgh: The Rise and Fall of Scotland’s City of Money
By removing the market’s solution to collapsing banks, this unraveling forced electorate-sensitive governments to take up the residual risk and backstop the financial system that Scottish banks themselves so effectively regulated in the past.
This Is Not a Printing Press
The Fed has been successful in fooling the markets regarding the temporary nature of zero-percent interest rates, the efficacy of QE, and its ability to normalize rates and shrink its balance sheet.
Jean-Baptiste Say, Capitalism and Say’s “Law of Markets”
Say’s Law of Markets already included the answers to the questions against free markets with which the Keynesians attempted to challenge the efficacy of capitalism a century later.
“Hostile” Takeovers Aren’t Actually Hostile
A “hostile” corporate raider can only buy shares that others voluntarily sell.
Case for Unilateral Free Trade (with Exceptions)
The coherent and correct case for free trade is, again, a case for unilateral free trade, one that applies to each country individually (with exceptions for isolated circumstances such as national defense).
The Virtue of Production
Business, the activity of producing and trading goods and services, demands a great deal of moral virtue, and businesspeople are not lowly materialists but moral creators.
Say’s Law and the Keynesian Revolution: How Macroeconomic Theory Lost Its Way by Steven Kates
Steven Kates refutes Keynes’s caricature of the classical economists. Ultimately it is always goods that are traded for goods. Say’s Law, properly understood, explains both what causes unemployment and how to solve it..
The Mirage of Increasing Profits Under Monetary Inflation
Inflation—the government’s expansion of the money supply—creates the appearance of business prosperity along with the fact of general impoverishment, which results in blaming poverty on business and profits.
Yield Curve Inversions Don’t Improve Investment Outcomes
Ronald Reagan once remarked that the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Similarly, the financial economist Campbell Harvey recently wrote that the four most dangerous words, feared by central bankers...
Wealth Tax Consumes Capital To Appease Envy
Amongst Thomas Piketty, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Jerry Yang, and Jeremy Corbyn a wealth tax is all the rage as a means to rectify “wealth inequality”. But what does it really do?
Why the U.S. Yield Curve Reliably Predicts U.S. Recessions
Economists, investors, and policy makers would do well to take seriously the predictive power of the yield curve, to study and comprehend not only its empirical but also its causal features.
Capitalism and Finance: In Defense of Share Buybacks
The confused objections to share buybacks illustrate the failure to look past the immediate effect and to understand what financial markets do.
Price Controls Attack the Freedom of Speech
We increasingly live in a new “dark age” of economic ignorance, and even stupidity. Few things exemplify this trend as much as the call for price controls over the interactions of multitudes of people in the marketplace of supply and demand. There are few government...
On “Price Gouging” Water During Hurricanes and Natural Disasters
Allowing prices to rise to heights that accurately reveal the intense desperation of the situation is the surest means of encouraging additional supplies of vital goods to be rushed ASAP to the area.
Shareholders, Not “Stakeholders”
So many CEOs know so little about economics that they don’t know that in a free market producing for the profit of their stockholders in and of itself implies producing for the benefit of everyone.
Bernie Sanders vs Walmart: The Wealth of the Wealthy
Bernie wants us to fear billionaires. Actually, the billionaires work for us — for the great mass of average people. They want to acquire money from us. Unlike the government, they cannot simply come and seize our money.
Elder vs. Instagram: Innocent Mistake or Viewpoint Discrimination? Part II
“We’ve decided to offer a competing platform where no voices will be unfairly targeted.”
Lessons From Free Banking in Scotland
Rothbard does not refute White’s thesis that Scottish banking was less regulated and hence more stable and well-functioning than England’s banking system in the same 145-year period.
A Free-Market Gold Standard?
Any official effort to link the dollar to gold today would be just another act of monetary central planning.
Obama’s New Documentary American Factory
American Factory is at its core a damning snapshot of American labor entitlement.
Facebook, Instagram and Discrimination Against Conservative Viewpoints
My radio colleague Dennis Prager heads a nonprofit, tax-exempt charitable organization called Prager University. It shares five-minute educational videos from a conservative perspective. There have been over 2 billion views. No sex. No profanity. No chase scenes. But...
Is Google Too Big and Powerful?
Instead of worrying about Google’s influence, we should oppose a real threat: government’s initiation of force, through measures such as carbon taxes or dictating how Google should operate.
Scottish Banks and the Bank Restriction, 1797-1821, Part 3
Blame the Bankers, Not Freedom in Banking
Scottish Banks and the Bank Restriction, 1797-1821, Part 2
That there was widespread support for the Scottish bank suspension did not, however, mean that the suspension left the Scottish public unscathed.
Scottish Banks and the Bank Restriction, 1797-1821, Part 1
Does the Scottish suspension suggest that fractional reserve banking is, inconsistent with genuine freedom in banking, including the consistent honoring of bank customers’ property rights?
How Much Damage Will Come from this Trade War?
First, the good news: the U.S. and world economies have not imploded, so far, as fallout from the rising trade tensions between the Trump administration and Xi Jinping’s government in China. Now, the bad news: there is no certainty that this will not play itself out...
The Practical Value of Ethics in Business
If you are a student of business, in any stage of your career, I encourage you learn about rational egoism—if success in business is your goal.
The Myth of Profit Making as Exploitation
Pursuing self-interest in business is not exploitative, because it can only be based on voluntary trade.
Hazony’s Tradition-Based Society Is Social Engineering
At any moment in time, the world seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. Manners are missing; ethics are being eliminated; culture is corrupted; social attitudes are supercilious; virtues are vanishing; literature is mostly licentious; industry and commerce are...