Economics

The deeper problem with Paltrow’s cause is that it presumes that taking wealth from some people by force and handing it to others is moral. It is not. Individuals have a moral right to use their wealth as they see fit. In no case may government morally seize people’s wealth by force and turn it over to others.

A 1792 U.S. penny, designed in part by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, reads “Liberty Parent of Science & Industry.”

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials that Shape Our Modern World, by Mark Miodownik. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. 272 pp. $16.45 (hardcover). Reviewed by Daniel Wahl In May 1985, a young Mark Miodownik sat on a train, with a fresh thirteen-centimeter stab wound in his back, and thought…

“Piketty’s Rickety Assault on Capital” dismantles and dispatches Thomas Piketty’s arguments against free markets and the principle of rights, including the “fuzzy math in Piketty’s alleged laws of capitalism.

Contrary to Jonathan Coppage’s claims, services in a market economy are fundamentally dependent on the ownership of property—both physical and intellectual—not somehow untethered from it. The Hank Reardens of the world, the industrial “makers” whom Coppage demeans, continue to play a fundamental role in the economy, and they always will.

Addresses a key aspect of the left's "equality" agenda that muddies Americans' thinking on the issue and enables the left to turn people's good intentions against their genuine interests.

Piketty stirs up resentment against the producers and holders of wealth, and then says we need to tax it away to assuage that resentment. Instead, as an economist, he should be explaining why wealth is good and how, in the hands of those who know how to invest it profitably, it leads to prosperity for everyone involved in the economy.

True, new technologies make some jobs obsolete. But new technologies also make possible new careers. Moreover, because producers who employ new technologies manufacture more and better products at lower costs, their customers have money left to spend in expanded or entirely new industries.

Unfortunately, when some economists think of values as “subjective,” they assume that there is no objective standard for determining moral value; they assume that value is only a matter of personal opinion.

Whereas rational ethics holds that if you want the values on which your life and happiness depend, you must take the actions necessary to gain and keep those values; rational economics holds that if you want to trade value for value in the marketplace, you must first produce value with which to trade.