The Social Function of Stock Speculators
Despite their horrible reputation, stock speculators perform a crucial service in the market economy. Their attempts to buy low and sell high quickly eliminate mispricings in the stock market.
Despite their horrible reputation, stock speculators perform a crucial service in the market economy. Their attempts to buy low and sell high quickly eliminate mispricings in the stock market.
Rather, the popular debate over Wal-Mart is an important part of a broader debate between freedom and interventionism. Those who vilify Wal-Mart do so not for Wal-Mart's political failings but for Wal-Mart's economic successes.
There is only one system that can support a national and world population on this scale, and it is not socialism, primitivism, or any other than capitalism. Moreover, no form of government can create wealth.
However, even though the Federal Reserve's monetary excesses may occasionally lure too many into day trading and real estate investing, both are worthy entrepreneurial activities. There is nothing inherently slimy about trading real estate, and certainly nothing warranting the state's regulation of this market.
Every human being, by his nature, is free; he controls himself. But in the Old World, men believe that some Authority controls them. They cannot make their energy work by any such belief, because the belief is false.
Last Friday, I presented a paper (co-authored with Walter Block) at the 49th Colloquium on the Law of Outer Space at the International Astronautica
Gary North's government trap or capture model provides an abundant set of predictions about how governments accumulate power and control over industries.
We are glad that public choice economists started studying this topic three decades ago, and we hope to see a resurgence in explorations in the theory of anarchy.
I heartily await other fortunes that discuss capital theory, interest rates, the business cycle, and perhaps even price controls.
By serving customers as an entrepreneur, or following in Murray's footsteps as a scholar and teacher. Austrian economics is the intellectual backbone for the freedom movement.