I've been thinking a lot lately about labor and wealth. I think America's working poor have them in about the right ratio. Perhaps we're even better off than we deserve to be. So it's not for our own sakes that we oppose the greedy machinations of the super-wealthy. It's not from us that they steal. It's not our own share that we fight to have ( Read more... )

In a completely free market, there is no such thing as a corporation. A corporation is a legal fiction created to protect an entrepreneur's personal property from debts incurred in their commercial endeavors. In a sense, corporations are a form of welfare; they assure that failure, whether it be from poor judgment or bad luck, will not leave the ( Read more... )

It's a small philosophical step from castle doctrine to getting medieval on corrupt capitalists who break the market in order to steal from it.

Socialism, in the broadest sense, is government effecting social change through economic means.

Individual rights do not extend to harming others. The purpose of economic regulation is to limit indirect, non-obvious, or long-term harm.

A real market works like a theoretical market if and only if:

• There are an infinite number of producers
• There are an infinite number of consumers
• There is an infinite supply of resources
• The cost of trades does not scale with distance
• Consumer knowledge is complete and perfect

The more I learn, the more I discover that my "radical" theories are not new at all. In fact, some of them have been tried, and they work very well.

Today's example: the idea that a completely free market is by no means a functional market, and that the primary purpose of government regulation should be to restrict abuses of the market that cause ( Read more... )

The DJIA fell below 7,000 today, to a 12-year low.

Come on, baby... four thousand! Prove me right again!

(Reuters) - Americans have long tolerated Wall Street's big bonuses, bigger egos and outsized influence because the firms and their executives at least made lots of money. Now, those days are over.

No, you morons. We never "tolerated" Wall Street. We just didn't have the means to destroy it.

"No longer are these people seen as soldiers of ( Read more... )

I crammed sixteen hours of reading into an hour and a half before my econ final this morning. I feel like I did pretty well on it.

Even though the class is over, I'm going to go back to the library this week and check out the textbook again. In one of the final chapters, it gets into something very intriguing: in a perfectly competitive market, ( Read more... )

They finally admitted what most of us already know: the economy is in a recession and has been for at least a year. I still say that certain sectors of the economy (e.g., the middle class) have been in a recession since 2003.

We may yet see truth in my prediction that the Dow will correct itself to around 4,000 before this is over.