In this excerpt from WichitaLiberty.TV, I introduce the video "I, Pencil" and then show the movie as created by Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Posts tagged as “Laissez faire”
Andrew Bernstein is a proponent of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, an author, and a professor of philosophy. We talk about capitalism and other subjects.
Now in movie form, the story of the humble pencil illustrates the wonder and power of "the spontaneous configuration of creative human energies."
Why are so many opposed to private property and free exchange -- capitalism, in other words -- in favor of large-scale government interventionism? Lack of knowledge, or ignorance, is one answer, but there is another.
Today: Wichita City Council; What if the NFL Played by Teachers' Rules?; Do-nothing Hoover?; Kansas school cash; John Locke to appear in Wichita.
"I, Pencil" explains the impossibility of centralized government planning.
Wichita government planners liken their planning process to that of individuals and businesses. but as Ludwig von Mises explains, the analogy does not hold.
While Kansas Republicans want to create a business-friendly environment, we have to be watchful for harmful crony, or false, capitalism.
In Wichita this Monday, Robert L. Bradley, Jr. explained the state of capitalism in America today, using his experience working in a high-level position at the failed energy conglomerate Enron as a backdrop.
Bradley asked: What happened to business prudence? What has happened to capitalism? The answer is that what we have today is not free market capitalism. Rather, it's a very different type of capitalism: political capitalism.
Austrian economist Walter Block delivers a lecture that draws the parallels and differences between now and the Great Depression.
But it doesn't stop them.
Over at the Kansas Jackass blog, it appears there's been a discussion about libertarianism and how it doesn't work. I think however, that the Jackass and some of his sycophants are misinformed about a few things.
Did the "excesses" of capitalism cause the current financial crisis? First, we really don't have capitalism in the United States, at least not any reasonable semblance of laissez faire capitalism, as explained in my post The Myth that Laissez Faire Is Responsible for Our Present Crisis, based on the work of Professor George Reisman.
The events taking place in the financial market offer an illustration of the soundness of the Austrian theory of money, banking, and credit cycles, and Mises.org, which has long warned of precisely the scenario playing itself out today, is your source not only for analysis of these events but also the economic theory that helps explain what is happening and what to do about it. There are many thousands of articles available, and also the full text of thousands of books as well as journal articles.
The Foundation for Economic Education has a new version of I, Pencil to celebrate its 50th anniversary. Click here to view the announcement and read this short book.
In This Book is So Me, Walter Block introduces a book that I’ve quoted from and used extensively: Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt.…
Any editorial that starts with "Karl Marx was right about at least one thing ..." deserves close examination, especially when it appears in Kansas' largest newspaper and is written by that newspaper's former editor. The thrust of Davis Merritt's article is that the theory of free markets hasn't worked: "We're painfully experiencing right now the unraveling of neat free-market theory." (Pragmatism needs to trump ideology, November 18, 2008 Wichita Eagle)
I’m listening to Joe Scarborough on MSNBC, and he says: “Laissez-faire capitalism is a wonderful thing except in this case …” I’ve heard stuff like…