To start with an anecdote of my personal intellectual history, I have to recall reading The Gulag Archipelago as a youth. There were two things that impressed me about this work although I later came to view much of the author’s assertions to be questionable and distorted. However, if one reads the entirety of Solzhenitsyn as […]
In 2013, 1 out of every 10 American homes was valued at more than double the production costs. Demand for housing alone isn't driving up costs, because if it was we would expect high cost places to also have high levels of construction. So why is the cost of housing so high?
According to conventional wisdom, a rising population must result in poverty and famine. Yet, human beings can innovate their way out of scarcity by increasing the supply resources or by developing substitutes. Human ingenuity, in other words, is “the ultimate resource” that makes all other resources more plentiful, including water.
While it’s true that water is a scarce resource, it is simply untrue that water is a precious resource. Potable water is sufficiently abundant today in most places where human beings live that it can be acquired at a low price. Indeed, given modern techniques for delivering and safely storing potable water, water is widely available today even in some desert areas, such as Las Vegas and Tucson.
Buffett is wrong. This isn’t the capitalist way at all. This is just the way that every economy should work. Whether communist, socialist, social democratic or capitalist, all systems will economize on the inputs of production. That is what makes us richer.
“Protectionism” – with the sweet sound of the verb “to protect” – is far too kind and inaccurate a word for a policy that attacks consumers for the benefit of domestic producers. It should really be called “scarcityism,” which better exposes the true nature of government-erected obstacles to people’s access to goods and services.
90% of the globe’s fisheries are either fully fished or overexploited. Command-and-control regulations are essentially useless for protecting sensitive species, but this simple market-based strategy is reducing the negative environmental effects of overfishing.
In college, Economics 101 is often described as the social science discipline that deals with the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services. MIT Economist Paul Samuelson liked to focus on scarcity, or more specifically, the allocation of scarce resources. “Abundance” was always a pretty word with an idyllic connotation for Professor Samuelson.
It’s very reassuring that more people are slowly learning how our monetary system really works: if you want to fix something, you need to know a bit about it. The indefatigable Ellen Brown has been hugely helpful in this regard with her regular well-informed and easy-to-read articles that relentlessly confront the myths of capitalist monetary theory.
From The Libertarian Standard, Nov. 19, 2010. Any updates to this post will be made here. Justice and Property Rights: Rothbard on Scarcity, Property, Contracts… Rothbard has so many amazing works. Some of my favorite of his articles include “The Mantle of Science,” “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution” (pdf), “Beyond Is and Ought,” “Toward […]
