Month: May 2012
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Wichita taxicab regulations likely to impede progress
The Wichita City Council will consider new taxicab regulations that, city hall hopes, will improve tax service in Wichita. But the regulations create high barriers to entry that stifle entrepreneurship and market competition, likely dooming the program to fail.
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Myth: All relations among humans can be reduced to market relations
Attempting to reduce all actions to a single motivation falsifies human experience. Not all human relationships are reducible to the same terms as markets; at the very least, those that involve involuntary “exchanges” are radically different, because they represent losses of opportunity and value, rather than opportunities to gain value.
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Palmer, activist for capitalism, to speak in Wichita
Tom G. Palmer, activist for capitalism and editor of the new book The Morality of Capitalism, will be in Wichita on May 16th.
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Kansas and Wichita quick takes: Thursday May 10, 2012
Today: Kansas tax reform; School funding; Separation of art and state; Stimulus spending; Elizabeth Warren; Drug court to be Pachyderm topic; Failure of socialism to be shown; Yes we can! No they can’t!
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Myth: Privatizaton and marketization in post-communist societies were corrupt, which shows that markets are corrupting
Mere “privatization” in the absence of a functioning legal system is not the same as creating a market. Markets rest on a foundation of law; failed privatizations are not failures of the market, but failures of the state to create the legal foundations for markets.
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Myth: When prices are liberalized and subject to market forces, they just go up
While money prices may go up in the short time when prices are freed, the result is to increase production and diminish wasteful rationing and corruption, with the result that total real prices — expressed in terms of a basic commodity, human labor time — goes down.
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Myth: Markets only benefit the rich and talented
When trade takes place in free markets, both parties win. Free societies also lead to the “circulation of elites,” with no one guaranteed a place or kept from entering by accident of birth. The phrase “the rich get richer and the poor gets poorer” applies, not to free markets, but to mercantilism and political cronyism,…
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Intellectuals vs. the rest of us
Why are so many opposed to private property and free exchange — capitalism, in other words — in favor of large-scale government interventionism? Lack of knowledge, or ignorance, is one answer, but there is another.
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Political cronyism has become the way
Cronyism is the practice of seeking business success through government rather than through markets. The difference is that business succeeds in the market by providing goods and services that people are willing to buy. Political cronyism, on the other hand, results in people being forced to buy from, or to otherwise involuntarily subsidize, certain business…
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Myth: Markets debase culture and art
There is no contradiction between the market and art and culture. Market exchange is not the same as artistic experience or cultural enrichment, but it is a helpful vehicle for advancing both.
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Myth: Markets rest on the principle of the survival of the fittest
In market competition, the losers are not eaten by the winners, as is the case in biological competition. When business firms die, they are replaced by more efficient firms, and the investors, owners, managers, and employees are released to join more efficient firms.