Murphy Battles Anti-Market Economics and Ethics
Robert Murphy's admirable book is much more than a conventional defense of capitalism. Murphy includes standard material, e.g., why price controls, minimum wage legislation, and rent control do not work. Though it was once controversial to point to the inadequacies of these measures, now even mainstream textbooks hasten to condemn them. Murphy goes far beyond this. He takes on the most difficult and controversial challenges to the free market, and offers convincing responses to them. FULL ARTICLE
Comments (9)
Fephisto
This is usually my reply to NASA-junkies:
"The job of the government is not to make cool toys."
Published: March 10, 2008 10:22 AM
David Spellman
Why should we go to the moon at all if consumers aren't willing to pay for it of their own free will? Only lunatics support a government space program!
Published: March 10, 2008 10:51 AM
Peavey
Don't some of the extracts from this book sound uncannily similar to the 1946 book "Economics in one Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt? http://jim.com/econ/contents.html
Hazlitt: "Again we must make an effort of the imagination to see the private power plants, the private homes, the typewriters and television sets that were never allowed to come into existence because of the money that was taken from people all over the country to build the photogenic Norris Dam."
Murphy: "By using up scarce resources in the space program (or building a sports stadium), the government delivers tangible benefits, but also destroys unseen possibilities of the alternative products and services that those resources could have created."
etc.
Is this stuff not worryingly simple? Worrying because the more I read of articles like this, the more I realise that these ideas have not occurred to many of the people who are supposed to be economists and, for all I know, are running the economy.
Published: March 10, 2008 8:38 PM
D. Saul Weiner
Murphy's analysis of executive compensation is interesting, but does not address why there is such a disparity in the compensation between the execs and the workers in the U.S. relative to other industrialized countries. Are the U.S. CEOs that much better? Doubtful. Are the other countries not paying their CEOs enough? Paying their workers too much? That would have been a much more satisfying angle for this reader.
Published: March 11, 2008 7:25 PM
D. Saul Weiner
It would have been informative for Murphy to document how the MIC has subverted our manufacturing base, now that so much of our talent and other resources go into manufacturing weapons, but that may have alienated the conservative reader base.
Published: March 11, 2008 7:29 PM
scineram
I guess the european CEOs are subject to more taxes and envy.
Also, what conservative base?
Published: March 11, 2008 7:38 PM
TLWP Sam
Why can't the position of CEOs be outsourced to India? I mean if software development can be outsourced to India . . .
Published: March 12, 2008 1:06 AM
fundamentalist
D. Saul Weiner : “Are the U.S. CEOs that much better? Doubtful. Are the other countries not paying their CEOs enough? Paying their workers too much
American athletes are paid much better than European athletes, too. That’s why Beckham moved to LA. Are American athletes better? No. But the demand is much greater. Something similar could be said of CEO’s. Europeans and socialists in general, don’t value skilled management as much as capitalists do. Socialists underestimate the skills needed by a CEO. They think any monkey with two bananas can do the job. But good CEO’s are very rare, like good athletes.
D. Saul Weiner : “It would have been informative for Murphy to document how the MIC has subverted our manufacturing base, now that so much of our talent and other resources go into manufacturing weapons.
Nothing that exposes government distortion of the markets would alienate the readers of this web site. But you’re simply wrong about the MIC. Just look at the data from the BEA and you’ll see that 1) our manufacturing base is far from being “subverted”; we’re the largest manufacturing nation in the world, and 2) weapons is a small part of what we manufacture.
TLWP Sam: “Why can't the position of CEOs be outsourced to India? I mean if software development can be outsourced to India . . .”
Most people underestimate the unique and rare skills required to be a good CEO. The software that gets outsourced to India is the routine kind of programming that low-skilled programmers can do. Anything very sophisticated stays at home. I’m not certain, but I would bet that the programming for IPod is done in California.
Published: March 12, 2008 8:29 AM
fundamentalist
PS, when foreign companies buy American companies, the CEO job is automatically outsourced.
Published: March 12, 2008 8:51 AM