Why Socialism Won’t Eliminate Worker ‘Exploitation’

A belief still commonly held today by not just Marxists and Socialists, but progressives of many stripes, is the insistence that employers are “stealing” part of their workers’ labor because the wage workers receive from their employer is less than the contribution of their labor to the final value (i.e. selling price) of the finished good.
Bohm-Bawerk’s work, however, systematically demonstrates that so-called surplus value would not be eliminated under socialism – rather it would be shifted from capitalists to the state.

America’s Other Democracy

What if there was another form of democracy right under our noses that allowed voting 24 hours a day, seven days a week – and not just every two or four years?
Moreover, instead of elections every two or four years, in which turnout rates over fifty percent are celebrated, this other democracy is “all around, under your nose, as near as your telephone from which you can call a doctor or plumber, or order a pizza or airline tickets.” Turnout is 100 percent because everyone participates.

The racism behind the Associated Press’ decision to capitalize “Black”

So, according to the AP, white people should be afforded the dignity of having their unique backgrounds being acknowledged, but Black people are unworthy of the same recognition.
Stripping people of their individuality is not a way to lift people up, but rather to belittle them. In so doing, the AP and other progressives betray how little they think of the very people they claim to be championing

Should billionaires exist?

A mantra popularized by Bernie Sanders and like-minded progressives declares “billionaires should not exist.”
The statement serves as both a declaration of the ‘immorality’ of wealth inequality as well as a justification for steep, confiscatory taxes on wealth favored by the likes of Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
But as Ludwig von Mises pointed out in Human Action, confiscatory taxes on the wealthy may indeed cause billionaires to be slightly worse off, but the rest of us will be harmed more severely.

Revisiting the One Lesson

How a society deals with the reality of scarcity determines that society’s level of prosperity and standard of living. This is why the concept of opportunity costs is so important, and why Hazlitt made this his ‘one lesson’ in his famous book.

About that Existential Comics ‘Pop Quiz’ on Housing

A tweet by the faux-philosopher and economically-illiterate “Existential Comics” account recently made the rounds. It might be easy to dismiss, but with more than 345k followers, the account apparently appeals to a lot of like-minded people. The profit motive is clearly the villain in this story, under the belief that a more equitable means of distribution is desired. Below are three main points we can make to show why this tweet is so ignorant.

Is Praxeoloxy a pseudoscience?

A recent Medium.com article labeled praxeoloxy, and by default Austrian Economics, as psuedoscience.
The article, however, fails on several accounts; most notably in conflating praxeology with psychology, a fairly common mistake made by critics of the Austrian school.

No, capitalism is not “dog eat dog”

Characterizing a capitalist market economy as “dog eat dog” is laughably inaccurate. It’s a naïve smear made by those who don’t understand the nature of cooperation in a market economy based on the division of labor.
The analogy is intended to create a mental picture: one of fierce, animalistic competition in a state of nature, in which one can only succeed by inflicting pain on the other. Capitalism, they would say, is to be opposed because of this vicious competition and replaced instead with a more virtuous socialist system in which the means of production are collectively owned and such destructive competition is eliminated.