Thanksgiving is a time to count your blessings. One of my blessings is family and for that reason Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday growing up. My four brothers were significantly older than me (you might say I was a mistake) and were off with their own families on Christmas. But on Thanksgiving the whole family [...]
I think the most obvious sign that economics is driven by scholarship rather than science is the relatively unchanging continuation of the business corporation model. Paul Krugman and Milton Friedman may be quite different as economic scholars, but neither questions the entrenchment of the business corporation. Why should this model remain unchanging for hundreds of [...]
The first time the field of economics got me scratching my head was about twenty years ago when a textbook informed me there were only three basic questions governing the distribution of resources. How do resources get distributed? How much is distributed? Who receives the distributed resources? Twenty years later I was informed the same [...]
Perhaps this is a good time to reiterate that I am not an economist. My economic knowledge was constructed from an economic textbook, an economics course on CD, writings of mainly famous economists, Wikipedia and the Powell Cabal’s misinformation network in support of laissez faire capitalism. I do not read peer-reviewed economic journals unless a [...]
Imagine that you are offered a choice for home entertainment that is to last you the rest of your life. One choice is a television with only one station available, a news station run by a corporate giant, but includes three different video game consoles with twenty games from different companies to choose from. The [...]
Both Dr. George Reisman and I are unhappy about what some critics of our current economic crisis are saying. In his article “The Myth that Laissez Faire is Responsible for our Current Economic Crisis,” Dr. Reisman faults those who are blaming laissez faire policies, since our economic system falls short of the laissez faire ideal. [...]
This entry is part of a series focusing on Dr. George Reisman’s article, “The Myth that Laissez Faire is Responsible for our Current Economic Crisis.” The article provides a defense of laissez faire capitalism and states, correctly, that our economic system falls short of that ideal. But there is a good reason for that. As [...]
In the article, “The Myth that Laissez Faire is Responsible for our Current Economic Crisis” Dr. George Reisman details a few ways in which the country currently strays from laissez faire capitalism. He provides the following description of what he views as this ideal economic system: ” … a politico-economic system based on private ownership [...]
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Early on The Middle Class Forum featured a series on unenlightened economists. The series featured an article by just one economist, Edwin Glaeser from Harvard, and touched on politics and culture as much as economics. I always intended to pick up with this again as The Middle Class Forum became grounded more in politics and [...]
The last system characteristic on the economic report card is market stability. Stability depends on income and wealth distribution and the rate of inflation. Both high wealth disparity and high inflation hampers the ability to trade goods and services, the essence of market activity. The economic report card revealed instability due to both factors of [...]