James R. Otteson, Adam Smith’s Marketplace of Life . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. xiii + 338 pp. $26 (paperback), ISBN: 0-521-01656-8. Reviewed for EH.NET by Jeffrey T. Young, Department of Economics, St. Lawrence University. For too long Adam Smith has been viewed almost exclusively as the intellectual property of economists.
In yet another free-market blow to Microsoft’s much-vaunted “monopoly power,” Wal-Mart is offering cheap desktop computers equipped with three non-Microsoft operating systems. Just $199 brings you a bare-bones machine loaded with Xandros ; for a little more you can get the same machine with Linspire or Sun’s Java Desktop . Meanwhile, Mozilla’s
“Salvation Army officials don’t know who has been dropping gold coins into their holiday kettles over the last 20 years, but they hope the mysterious donations continue.” reports the Philadelphia Inquirer
This new group blog, Left2Right , features such heavy hitters as Lewis Kornhauser, Richard Rorty, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. “In the aftermath of the 2004 Presidential election, many of us have come to believe that the Left must learn how to speak more effectively to ears attuned to the Right. How can we better express our values? Can we learn from
They just keep reproducing, though far more slowly than anticipated by doomsayer Paul Ehrlich in his famous Population Bomb . Ehrlich is hardly contrite, telling the New York Times that the earth’s optimal population is two billion. “I have severe doubts that we can support even two billion if they all live like citizens of the U.S.,” he said.
From a recent Motley Fool “Post of the Day” : “Warren Buffett once scoffed at the idea of efficient markets by saying that if they were efficient, he’d be a bum with a tin cup, or words to that effect. “In his great treatise _Man, Economy, and State_, Murray N. Rothbard pointed out that entrepreneurs make profits not by being correct in their
Carl Menger pointed out that producers of unique goods and services do not have arbitrary and unlimied “monopoly power.” Their actions are instead constrained by rivals and by consumers’ subjective preferences. The monopolist has only limited discretion which, if abused, can be frittered away. An example is the worldwide frenzy for the 1.0 release
TomPalmer says in his comments to this post that for Murray Rothbard to have celebrated the fall of Saigon and the overthrow of the Republic of Vietnam was a “disgrace,” a “departure...from the entire philosophy of liberty with which he was so closely associated,” and a few other things too. Well, here is a news item I found in my file . The death
My father Milton M. Klein, retired professor of history at the University of Tennessee, died from cancer Thursday morning. The local newspaper carried a brief article this morning (free registration required). My Dad was a colonial American historian who got his PhD at Columbia about the same time as Murray Rothbard. While I never succeeded in
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.