This category covers posts with economic content.
The minimum wage is one of the dumbest, most short-sighted policies there is. It is worse than other price controls because human labor is almost universally required for the production of all goods.
Yet so many people have weird ideas about wages and how they are determined that the vast majority of people think there is nothing wrong with this highly destructive policy.
Available on Odysee and Bitchute.
Update: Now also available on YouTube.
There are those who will make themselves willfully blind to ensure their viewpoints cannot be challenged. These people forget how important it is to consider secondary effects from any policy choice.
The good analyst, the good economist, looks at the long-term effects on groups that a policy indirectly affects as well as the direct, intended effects.
And subjugating liberty toward safety is a hole with no bottom.
The word “competition” gets a really bad reputation from a lot of directions these days. However, much of that reputation comes from the fact that the term “competition” in economics doesn’t have all of the implications it does in plain English. This allows anti-market forces to associate a wide variety of contemptible behavior under the umbrella of “competition,” while papering over the fact that many of the negative elements associated with competition are actually not included in the economic definition of competition.
It seems like economics has this problem in a variety of places, where they come up with terms that use preexisting English words with specific connotations. “Perfect” competition is another example of this, where “perfect” in the context of economics means “adhering to the model” as opposed to “morally righteous” or “correct.”
Check out my video for more! Also available on Odysee at https://odysee.com/@MarginalNonHermit:3/rehabilitating-competition:d
Update: The video is now also available on YouTube.
I heard about an article in the New Criterion a while back and did a little bit of examination and discussion of the article in a short video. The article is called “Leninthink,” and is written by Gary Saul Morson. It talks about the system of thought Lenin pushed as he reigned terror on the people of the newly formed Soviet Union.
Leninism, and, frankly, socialism of any type, are extremely dangerous and destructive ideologies, and it is important for any freedom-loving person to learn about these pernicious systems of thought, to better grapple with them and identify elements of them in modern political discourse.
My video is also available on Odysee at https://odysee.com/@MarginalNonHermit:3/leninthink-article-discussion:5
Update: The video is now also available on YouTube.
There was a nice little article by the great Robert P. Murphy on mises.org the other day, so I decided to do a reading of it. The reading is licensed under a Creative Commons License, per the requirements of the license.
The marginal revolution in economics was a major step forward in the late 1800s that helped solve some serious problems in the field, especially around the concept of value. Dr. Murphy’s article is a concise explanation of what it means to look at an economic problem “on the margins,” so go have a listen!
Also available on Odysee at https://odysee.com/@MarginalNonHermit:3/reading-what-does-marginality-mean:3
It always bugs me when people misdiagnose the cause of a lot of bad behavior by corporations, big ones especially. A lot of heat gets thrown at the corporations, and much is wasted burning the branches of this problem and ignoring the root, that is, the state.
Certainly, corporations can and will try to get away with a lot. But they have very little power to actually push people around before the state gets involved. And the state loves to get involved, because working with corporations gives them an excuse to use their power and find reasons to demand more!
I’ve been hearing a lot of what I would charitably term as concern trolls using late-stage capitalism as a rationale why so many firms today are becoming bad actors. No, it’s not because the Material Productive Forces are inevitably pushing us toward socialism. It’s not because voluntary trade has some kind of internal contradiction that will break upon itself and herald the next stage in social evolution.
It’s the state. The state’s velvet-covered iron fingerprints can be found practically everywhere these bad actors appear. And the idea of late-stage capitalism is just bad economics.
Enjoy.
Update: Video now also available on YouTube.
This showed up in the feed on Mises.org a few days ago and, even though it was published in the 1950s, it’s still extremely valid today. The video below is a short reading of a section of Mises’s book The Anti-capitalistic Mentality and it’s a good one. Enjoy!
The whole book is available for free from the Mises Institute at https://mises.org/library/anti-capitalistic-mentality. They also have a print version, if that’s more your style. All of the print books I’ve gotten from Mises have been very good quality, especially hardcovers.
Update: Video now also available on YouTube.
It’s very common these days for people defending labor unions and their tactics to act as if labor unions are a free-market phenomenon in the United States. In fact, labor unions have massive state privileges and their supporters won’t tell you about them. They ignore these privileges and act as if they are merely voluntary organizations.
As you might expect, even a cursory examination of labor law in the United States shows this narrative is completely false. The privileges and special treatments that labor unions receive from the state are very significant, and any economist worth his or her salt will tell you so.
I decided to make a video about some of these privileges and give some details and additional sources for anyone interested in learning more.
Enjoy!
Links for more info:
Forgotten Facts of American Labor History, by Tom Woods
https://mises.org/library/forgotten-facts-american-labor-history
Paper by Morgan O. Reynolds in J. Libertarian Studies
https://cdn.mises.org/6_3_3_0.pdf
Episode 1019 of the Tom Woods Show:
https://www.tomwoods.com/1019
Update: This video is now also available on YouTube.
Murray Rothbard, a great economic thinker of the 20th century and a strong philosophical influence on anarchism, was born on March 2nd, 1926. Here’s a short video where I talk a little bit about his influence and legacy.