Donald J. Boudreaux

All Markets are Sharing Economies

Market prices weave consumers together with each other, and with producers, into a humane and peaceful community of sharers.

sharingeconomy

The Theory of Perfect Competition Is Wholly Misleading

The theory of perfect competition should be utterly rejected, both as a theory of competition (which it is not) and as offering an appropriate standard against which to judge real-world markets (which it does not).

perfectcompetition

A Country Is Not Like a For-Profit Company

One of the most common faulty premises that infects discussions of economic policy is the premise that a country is like a private for-profit company, only larger. Nearly everything that the United States President says about trade makes sense if you understand him to believe that the United States economy is a gargantuan for-profit firm.

unitedstates

There Are No Natural Resources

Julian Simon’s most notable contribution is his demonstration that the human mind is, as he described it, “the ultimate resource.” The human mind is the ultimate resource because it, and only it, creates all of the other economically valuable inputs that we call “resources.”

coalmining

Capitalists Get Rich but Consumers Capture the Benefits

Producers, on average, capture a 2.2 percent of the total benefits of their successful introduction into markets of technological advances. A whopping 97.8 percent of those benefits are enjoyed by people each of whom as a consumer did nothing other than exercise his right to spend his money on those options that he judges best for himself.

consumers

The Best Trade Policy Is to Ignore Other Governments’ Trade Policies

Governments should treat each others’ economic policies as given, if only because almost all government interventions artificially help some producers and hurt others. Because every government is forever grasping for excuses to protect politically powerful domestic producers from foreign competition, each government can find such excuses in even the most mundane actions of foreign governments.

steelproduction