Lessons from Your Fax Machine by Karen Selick July 1, 1996 Have you ever heard someone ask: "How did we ever get along in the days before we had fax machines?" Think back. Ten years ago, most people had never heard of fax machines. They had just been invented. They were enormous clunky things, costing thousands of dollars, producing fading copies on that awful, curling thermal paper. Their usefulness was limited because so few other people had one. Today, for a few hundred bucks, you can get a neat little box that sits on the corner of your desk and lets you receive messages from almost anyone in the developed world. Even people who don't have their own machines usually have access to one at a nearby business for a modest fee. The fax phenomenon is not unique. I remember the first electric adding machine my father bought for his business, when I was about 10 years old. It cost $100-equivalent to almost $400 today. Nowadays, you can buy a calculator with ...
Book Review: Classics in Austrian Economics by Richard M. Ebeling June 1, 1996 Classics in Austrian Economics: A Sampling in the History of a Tradition edited by Israel M. Kirzner (London: William Pickering, 1994); three volumes; $300. The Austrian school of economics began in 1871 with the publication of Principles of Economics by Carl Menger. In the 1860s, while working in the Austrian ministry of prices, Menger came to realize that the actual way prices were formed on competitive markets had nothing to do with the labor theory of value of the classical economists. Instead, he began formulating an alternative theory showing that market prices arise from the subjective valuations of individuals who weigh in their minds the importance to them of buying or selling various relative quantities of goods. The value of things on the market, therefore, is derived from their utility or usefulness to individual users and not, as the classical economics had argued, from the quantity of labor devoted to their manufacture. This idea was to have radical implications. For example, one ...
Book Review: Community Without Politics by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 1996 Community without Politics: A Market Approach to Welfare Reform by David G. Green (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1995); 184 pages; £8.00. It seems that thirty years after the introduction of the Great Society programs of the 1960s, it is finally being accepted that a fundamental mistake was made. Rather than eliminating poverty, reviving neighborhoods and communities, and raising up those who seemingly were left at the periphery of society, the welfare state has perpetuated poverty, destroyed families and neighborhoods, and created an underclass of unemployables. But while there is a growing consensus that the welfare state is a failure that has generated outcomes perversely contrary to the publicly proclaimed intentions of its advocates and initiators, there is no consensus about what to put in its place. After all these decades of expanding state dependency by a growing number of people in the society, few can even conceive of a world without government safety nets and redistributive programs. The general view ...
The Failure of the Republican “Revolution,” Part 2 by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 1996 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 Our 19th-century American ancestors created the most unusual society in history. No income taxation. No Social Security. No Medicare. No Medicaid. No welfare. No public housing. ...
Book Review: Austrian Economics for Investors by Richard M. Ebeling February 1, 1996 Austrian Economics for Investors: Ludwig von Mises Goes to Wall Street by Mark Skousen (Potomac, Md.: Phillips Publishing, Inc., 1995); 46 pages; $10. Dr. Mark Skousen is that rarest of free-market economists. He cannot only write serious and original contributions to economic theory, he can also write popular works that ...
Optimism and Concern in Contemporary America by Richard M. Ebeling January 1, 1996 I was about fifteen years old, in the mid-1960s, when I became interested in free-market, libertarian ideas. I was initially influenced by Henry Hazlitt, who at that time still had a weekly column in Newsweek . I found his book Economics in One Lesson in a used bookstore, and after reading it, I decided that I wanted ...
Book Review: The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, Vol. 9 by Richard M. Ebeling September 1, 1995 The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, Vol. 9: Contra Keynes and Cambridge, Essays and Correspondence edited by Bruce Caldwell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 269 pages; $37.50. In 1941, American economist Kenneth Boulding reviewed Friedrich A. Hayek's The Pure Theory of Capital. He contrasted Hayek's views with those of John Maynard Keynes, and observed: "Mr. Keynes's economics of ... ...
Repatriation — The Dark Side of World War II, Part 5 by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 1995 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 When Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency in 1933, Americans expected him to fulfill certain promises that he had made during the presidential campaign: balance the budget; lower taxes; reduce government spending; downsize government; and ...
Terrorism — Public and Private by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 1995 On April 19, 1995, the federal building in Oklahoma City was bombed. Hundreds of people, including children, were killed or injured. Although federal government officials have been sporadically killed in the line of duty in the past, this was the first mass killing of federal civil servants in American history. There was tremendous shock, anger, and outrage over the Oklahoma ...
As Capitalism Wins, the U.S. Drops Out by Theodore J. Forstmann March 1, 1995 American political and economic life has entered a twilight zone. As countries everywhere are embracing capitalism, the United States, unfortunately, is moving toward democratic socialism. As I travel the world, the irony could not be more profound. I've been to Mexico to talk about free-market reform, to Russia and Eastern Europe — to meet with young entrepreneurs, and all over ...
Book Review: Dismantling Utopia by Richard M. Ebeling February 1, 1995 Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union by Scott Shane (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994); 324 pages; $25.00. Ten years ago, on March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union as General Secretary of the Communist Party. While great attention was given to Gorbachev's youthful 54 years of age in comparison to the other Soviet leaders ...
