Rulers To The Sky

READINGS: Chapter 9 of Robert Higgs’s Against Leviathan, ‘Private Law’ chapter of Bob Murphy’s Chaos Theory 1 Is it reasonable to require that a medical product be completely safe? No, all any certifying agency can hope to do is ensure that medical products are as safe as possible and that the manufacturer is not making […]

READINGS: Chapter 4 of Gene Callahan’s Economics for Real People; Chapter 5 of Holcombe et al.’s Fifteen Great Austrians (a chapter on French economist Frederic Bastiat) 1 What is the law of association? It was the term given by Mises to the broader application of the ‘law of comparative advantage’ to all human cooperation, on […]

READINGS: Sections from Murray Rothbard’s What Has Government Done to Our Money, Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, and Lew Rockwell’s The Economics of Liberty. 1 What are the functions of a bank? In Rothbard’s vision banks act as warehouses storing big piles of gold on behalf of depositors. The banks might issue gold-substitute certificates […]

READINGS: Sections two and three of Murray Rothbard’s What Has Government Done to Our Money?, Chapters five and nine of Gene Callahan’s Economics for Real People. 1 What are the disadvantages of barter? The two biggest are ‘indivisibility’ and ‘lack of coincidence of wants’. If my most valuable possession is a plow and I want […]

READINGS: Chapters 7, 8, 19, 20, 21 of Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, Chapter 7 of Gene Callahan’s Economics for Real People. 1 What is the definition of a laborer? A person selling his labor on the open market to achieve some end. Put another way: anyone who is not entirely supported by other […]

1 Why does [Peter] Klein characterize the traditional theory of the firm as “a calculus problem”? Standard economics treats firms as single-agent black boxes obeying the outputs of a ‘production function’, an approach which is appealing because it can be analyzed with the tools of calculus. 2 In neoclassical theory, what is a production function? […]

1 In mainstream theory, what is a “perfectly competitive” market? A purely competitive market is one in which all the sellers of a good are so small that they individually cannot move prices, distribution, or any other feature of the market around. This becomes a perfectly competitive market when perfect information is introduced. 2 In […]