Why do prisoners join prison gangs? The answer lies in the fact that, like everyone else, prisoners respond to changes in costs and benefits. If a course of action becomes relatively more costly, people will do less of it — ceteris paribus — and vice versa. Subjective preferences help people decide how to weigh costs and benefits, and these cannot
Income inequality has been a hot topic for some time and it is a driving factor in the desire for economic policy reform across the globe. An uneven distribution of income seems to justify a top-down solution if it redistributes unfair allocations of wealth. This, however, is not a clever strategy as the focus should instead be on what type of
It is clear that arbitrary minimum wage laws are not only ineffective, but actually detrimental to real wage growth . So what type of action results in increasing wages in the United States, or any country for that matter? The only way to raise real wages is to increase the per capita amount of capital invested by increasing capital accumulation.
Generally I think people who advocate for minimum wage laws mean well but likely have a fundamental misunderstanding of the topic. Pleas for a living wage are not new by any means. Saint Thomas Aquinas believed that commodities (farm products) should demand a fair price and that workers should be paid a sufficient income to support themselves. In
What is the Mises Institute?
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.