Economics

What about the benefits and costs of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic?

There isn’t much room for diversity and dissent, however, when everything is decided politically. Mass customization and diversity are commercial society’s virtues. Mass regimentation and uniformity are political society’s vices. The stark contrast is clear in the proximity between Halloween and Election Day.

The nearly universal opinion expressed these days is that the economic crisis of recent years marks the end of capitalism. Capitalism allegedly has failed, has proven itself incapable of solving economic problems, and so mankind has no alternative, if it is to survive, than to make the transition to a planned economy, to socialism.

The work furnished by the Government was done at the expense of labour, paid for by the tax-payer.

Much is hoped from the future prosperity of Algeria; be it so. But the drain to which France is being subjected ought not to be kept entirely out of sight.

On the myth that “it is the superfluity of the rich which makes bread for the poor.”

It is an injustice to the tax-payers, who are made to pay a debt which is no concern of theirs.

“A curse on machines! Every year, their increasing power devotes millions of workmen to pauperism, by depriving them of work, and therefore of wages and bread. A curse on machines!”

Some persons consider that plunder is perfectly justifiable, if only sanctioned by law.

They would gladly suppress the capitalist, the banker, the speculator, the projector, the merchant, and the trader, accusing them of interposing between production and consumption, to extort from both, without giving either anything in return.

The State opens a road, builds a palace, straightens a street, cuts a canal; and so gives work to certain workmen — this is what is seen: but it deprives certain other workmen of work, and this is what is not seen.

If they take one direction, it is only because they have been diverted from another.

It is nonsense to say that the Government officer will spend these hundred sous to the great profit of national labour; the thief would do the same; and so would James B., if he had not been stopped on the road by the extra-legal parasite, nor by the lawful sponger.

Keynesian Economics has continued to dominate and hold sway over the way the vast majority of economists think about and analyze the nature of economy-wide fluctuations in employment and output.  

You do not see that to dismiss a hundred thousand soldiers is not to do away with a million of money, but to return it to the tax-payers.

What would become of the glass makers, if nobody ever broke windows?

In Aristotle, we find a more subtle and sophisticated understanding of some economic themes than in Plato. While Aristotle’s answers were incomplete and often misdirected, as well as incorrect, he at least was among the first to ask the types of questions that centuries later became part of the heart of economic analysis and understanding.

Economics proves the existence of a harmony of the rational self-interests of all participants in the economic system—a harmony which permeates the institutions of private ownership of the means of production, economic inequality, and economic competition.

Capitalism is denounced as “an anarchy of production,” a chaos ruled by “exploiters,” “robber barons,” and “profiteers,” who “coldly,” “calculatingly,” “heartlessly,” and “greedily” consume the efforts and destroy the lives of the broad masses of average, innocent people.

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.