Economics
On page 169 of Man, Economy and State, Murray Rothbard asserts that “the origin of all property is ultimately traceable to the appropriation of an unused nature-given factor by a man and his “mixing” his labor with this natural factor to produce a capital good or a consumers’ good.” He makes two errors. Firstly in assuming that there are any unused unowned natural resources. Writing in the late 1950’s it should have been clear to… Read More »On Rothbard
I assert that long duration government borrowing is “taxation without representation” which is forbidden by the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Governments have three choices to fund their programmes: taxation, borrowing, and money printing (such as QE). Taxation requires the current generation of taxpayers to pay for the current generation of expenditures. Whereas long duration borrowing requires that some future generation of taxpayers, will pay for the expenditures of today’s generation. That future generation,… Read More »Taxation without Representation: Stealing from our Children
As with so many other aspects of economics, the origin of money gets caught up in politics. Many theorists want their preferred model of political economy to become self-evident from their analysis of what money is. Libertarians want to exclude the state from control of money and therefore assert that gold most exquisitely captures the required properties of money, and therefore it was inevitable that gold would become money, and requires no state imprimatur to… Read More »The Origin of Money in Sumer
Suppose there is a group of 20 children in the class, and they all like apples. Would you rather….a) give one apple to each of the 20 childrenb) give three apples to a random 10 of the children, and nothing to the other 10Which do you choose? Option (a) looks fairer, because each child gets the same. Yet each child only gets one apple. 20 apples in all. Option (b) looks less fair, because the… Read More »Apples
It would be nice if guaranteeing equality of outcomes could lead to a happier society, but it’s never going to happen. Communism is generally considered to be a political and economic system which is characterised by common ownership of the means of production and free access to the articles of consumption. It purports to be classless, stateless, and without money. Common ownership implies a planned economy, for it must exclude private trading and market determination… Read More »Why Communism must be Coercive
French economist Frédéric Bastiat, in his 1850 essay “The Balance of Trade” (#13 in “Selected Essays on Political Economy” attempts to debunk the mercantilist view of François Mauguin who prefers that their nation of France exports more than it imports. However, once we unpack the clever packaging of Bastiat’s narrative, we find that he gives support to the ideas he aimed to dismantle. Bastiat recounts the tale of two business transactions: wine from Bordeaux to… Read More »Is Bastiat a Englishman?