Kindle Notes & Highlights
The problem for Marxists is simple: every flaw in markets is worse under socialism.
Capitalism is the essential organizing system for large societies. Full stop. Period. There are no other contenders.
our ability to cooperate is not based on genetic differences. Instead, specialization is the result of a system--capitalism--that allows each of us to invest in highly differentiated skills and knowledge.
We can be confident of two things: other people will specialize in all the other things, the things we need but won’t be able to make for ourselves. And we will be entitled to the increase in consumption opportunities, or “profits,” that result from our specialization.
Capitalism gives individuals the incentive, and also the means, of acting to advance the interests of others.
The constant search for profit by entrepreneurs, where thousands of people are independently seeking along every conceivable avenue a means of serving others, is a remarkable achievement of capitalism.
Rent-seeking is immoral, but not illegal, so when we ask corporate leaders to refuse to participate in cronyism we are invoking the idea of “the system will only work if we can ensure that people are good.”
Capitalism, in short, is about consumer sovereignty, not about creating jobs.
For the least sensible opponents of capitalism, the only consideration is inequality. But poverty and inequality are completely different things. And they have very different solutions: The way to end poverty is to enable the poor to enrich themselves, so there are no poor people. The way to end inequality is to destroy wealth, so there are no rich people.
The point is that if you care mostly about inequality, you have to admit you are indifferent to the plight of the poor.
Folks who don’t understand capitalism always want to manage prices. But freely adjusting prices ensure that shortages will always be quickly mitigated, even if no one knows what the cause of the problem is.
In most cases, the best thing for state planners and regulators is not to plan and not to regulate. It’s not exactly doing nothing, but doing the “right kind of nothing.”
Since Branch Rickey had been part of the baseball apartheid system, the most we can do is acknowledge that he did try to make up for his sins by ending the color line. But the real credit should go to greed and the profit motive, because at some point it became too expensive to maintain the pretense that black players couldn’t play at the major league level.
The hard thing for most people to understand is that the only way to get plentiful supply at low prices is to allow high prices.
The only way to ensure low prices, and large supply, to buyers is to allow sellers to charge high prices, the highest they can get.
Ships need lighthouses, and entrepreneurs want profits. The “externalities mean markets fail” perspective rests on an assumption that entrepreneurs are passive and not very bright. By the time an economist has identified an externality or public good as a market failure, a group of people who stand to benefit may already have devised a private institution that solved the problem.
Competition in markets has no fixed price, and is robustly positive-sum. In politics you try to move money around and take credit for it. In markets you try to create value and make profits.
“the hope, almost pathetic in retrospect, that a broader education in economics will reduce the popular support for large government and the consequent pervasive bureaucracy.”
Entrepreneurs get the residual as profit in exchange organization and risk bearing.
Notice the intellectual sleight of hand: markets as they are, are found wanting. So we substitute the state as we can imagine
The government also faces a knowledge problem, and the government also has a problem of incentives and monitoring. Taken together, these claims are known as the “public choice” objection to the market failure justification for state action.
Wait. I can be a patriotic American, but also think that U.S. politicians are ninnies. Both can be true: our country is great, and our government is terrible. To be fair, European political officials are a pack of clowns and thugs, too.
every flaw in consumers is worse in voters.
• Monopoly? Check. Yes, the cable company is pretty bad. But the state is the very definition of monopoly.
The reason democratic nations have personal liberties, property rights, and rule of law is not that they are democracies. Rather, nations that have those things embody the entire package of the Western tradition of good government.
Elections are a check on tyranny, not a conjuring of the will of the people.
I glance at my lovely wife. And as always after a couple of beers, she looks strikingly attractive… as an audience for an economics lecture.
But if you have to pay someone to take the item away, or if other things made with that item cost more or have lower quality, then the item is garbage.
What VanDoren means by “religious” is that the claims for recycling rest on an assumed, if not always articulated, moral imperative rather than on trade-offs or costs.
As one earnest young staffer at a public works department in the northeast told me, “Recycling is cheaper, no matter how much it costs!”
Laws requiring recycling harm me, the environment, and everyone else. We have to take prices into account, because prices are telling us that we can’t save resources by wasting resources.
if our concern is with poverty, and the welfare of the poor in an absolute sense, we live in a golden age. More people have broken out of poverty in the last 50 years than in the previous 500 years. The reason is capitalism; there is no other explanation.
If capitalism is to be sustainable, we require a new consensus, an agreement that the state will not offer such blandishments and that entrepreneurs and corporations will not seek them.
