The Division of Labor

Tags: Austrian Economics Overview

11/20/2010 Robert P. Murphy

Instead of each person doing all of the work creating what he needs and wants, dividing the labor amongst all of us into specialties is clearly superior by increasing the productivity of labor. Then people trade their surpluses with each other in the market economy. No trade barriers anywhere should be allowed to limit this division of labor.

Recorded at the Mises Institute on Friday, 19 November 2010. Sponsored by Anastasia Thiele.

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.