Donald J. Boudreaux
Straightforward Facts About the American Economy
The American economy will continue to improve only if markets are left sufficiently free to overwhelm the innumerable obstructions, diktats, and other burdens that governments, at all levels, inflict on us as we attempt to peacefully pursue our commercial and household affairs.
Is Protectionism Justified If Trade Liberalization Causes the Wages of Low-Skilled Workers to Fall?
No country grows prosperous by dampening its citizens’ incentives to improve their skills as workers.
Trade’s Costs Are Not Losses
But because no one in a market economy is entitled to his or her particular source of income, whenever competition obliges producers to adjust to the demands of consumers, producers — while paying the costs of participating in a market economy — suffer nothing that ought to be described as losses.
Trade Has No Losers
Saying that trade has losers suggests that stopping trade would eliminate such losses. Wrong.
The Glory of Manhattan
Four million people, nearly all strangers to each other, are hurrying about to work and play, and doing so in ways that are remarkably orderly and productive — and all, of course, absent any overall design or direction.
How Self Interest Builds Prosperity and Community
Markets guided by prices daily lead each of us to share happily and abundantly with each other despite the reality that we are, to each other, mostly strangers. Familiarity, affection, and brotherly love are virtuous feelings but these feelings do not contribute as reliably to our material well being as does market exchange.
All Markets are Sharing Economies
Market prices weave consumers together with each other, and with producers, into a humane and peaceful community of sharers.
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).
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.
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.”
