Value and Exchange

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on 20 July 2015.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on 20 July 2015.

Apart from driving up prices, one of the main problems of subsidized government loans is the fact that a student can get the same loan terms for a high-risk degree in art history as for a safer degree in engineering.

While doctors and nurses become more scarce, the number of health care administrators continues to go up. The role of these administrators is to aggregate and centralize data, although there is no evidence this increases the value of health care.

Jurassic World is the latest film to portray deadly disasters supposedly caused by profit-seeking run amok. But would the private sector really produce a super-smart dinosaur that is likely to eat many of the customers?

Charity serves an important and indispensable function in society: not everyone can engage in enough productive work to meet the daily needs of his or her family. But entrepreneurs and businesses have to create wealth before it can be given away.

What if machines took most of our jobs? Things would become less expensive, and humans would become wealthier in real terms, just as has happened since the Industrial Revolution began. Fear of labor-saving technology continues unabated, nonetheless.

We’re often told that CEO pay is outrageously high and that increases in executive pay comes at the expense of worker pay. If we look beyond the few examples used by the pundits, however, we find that these oft-repeated “facts” are anything but.

We’re often told that some prices should be high, and some others should be low. But the real goal should not be high prices or low prices, but a price system that communicates what is valued in society.

If all work and all workers were homogenous, we might be able to say that the gender wage gap is caused by sexism, but the gap is better explained by big differences in the life goals and chosen industries of men and women.