[ formatted from this twitter thread - ed.] I present two conflicting theories of how the standard of living of the average wage earner rises: the prevailing, anti-capitalist theory, and my own, pro-capitalist theory. Keep in mind that every law ultimately rests on the threat to kill violators. That is the threat made against all who forcibly
Professor Reisman delivered this talk at a TEDx event held at Sage Hill High School in Newport Beach, California, on February 15, 2019. Further reading from Dr. Reisman: Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian . Classical Economics vs. The Exploitation Theory 13 Illustrations of the Benevolence of Capitalism His book Capitalism
While Adam Smith originated the doctrine that profits are a deduction from what is naturally and rightfully wages, Marx carried that doctrine to its ultimate limit, in the claim that the greed of the capitalists drives them to deduct so much from what rightfully belongs to the wage earners that the latter are left only with minimum subsistence.
Profits are sales minus costs. The costs reflect expenditures of money made in the past, sometimes, as in the case of depreciation on buildings, decades in the past. In contrast, the sales reflect money spent in the present, or at least in the current year. To the extent that the quantity of money and thus volume of spending in the economic system
For more than a century, one of the most popular economic doctrines in the world has been the exploitation theory. According to this theory, capitalism is a system of virtual slavery, serving the narrow interests of a comparative handful of businessmen and capitalists, who, driven by insatiable greed and power lust, exist as parasites upon the
Marxists hate capitalism and want to replace it with socialism because they believe that profits are stolen from wages. They begin with the idea that originally there were workers but no capitalists and that the value of the products the workers produced and sold was all wages. But then allegedly came the capitalists, who proceeded to deduct a
Warren and Sanders et al. are misled by the government’s inflation of the money supply into believing that the stagnation and decline of our economic system in recent decades is the result of growing economic inequality. The truth is that both the appearance of increasing wealth of the rich and the reality of declining actual wealth are the result
The Walton family (the owners of Walmart) is currently worth about $190 billion. The Koch Brothers and Mars families (candy bars) are both worth over $100 billion. Such facts are intolerable to socialists, communists, “progressives,” and, sad to say, today’s Democrats. Senator Bernie Sanders wants a tax of 77% on estates over $1 billion. He
The enviro-socialist “climate emergency” crowd was busy earlier this month trying to launch the human equivalent of a cattle stampede by getting people to plunge into socialism to avoid bad weather. There were headlines such as “Greenland is on track to lose most ice on record this year and has already shed 250 billion tons .” It turns out that
In a world in which there are men and women who do not know to which sex they belong, it should not be surprising that there are corporate CEOs who do not know for whom they work. Last month, the CEOs of 181 major corporations agreed that they no longer work simply for their stockholders but also for their “stakeholders,” (i.e., for everyone
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.