Still reading Ayn Rand’s “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” and a passage jumped out at me regarding price fixing and anti-trust. Given recent news regarding Apple’s supposed price fixing in e-books, the on going concerns about Obamacare, not to mention such government practices as; rent control, price controls in all manner of agricultural products, this quote jumped out at me.
By what conceivable standard can the policy of price-fixing be a crime, when practiced by businessmen,
I am still reading Ayn Rand’s “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” and I came across the following quote. The context is a discussion of anti-trust laws but it applies equally to thinking about government and business.
In the absence of any rational criteria of judgement, people attempted to judge the immensely complex issues of a free market by so superficial a standard as “bigness.” You hear it to this day: “big business,”
Once again Ayn Rand’s “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” is the source for today’s quote:
Whenever you buy one product rather than another, you are voting for the success of some manufacturer. And, in this type of voting, every man votes only on those matters which he is qualified to judge: on his own preferences, interests, and needs. No one has the power to decide for others or to substitute his judgement for theirs; no one has the power to appoint himself “the
Monday I shared a link on my Facebook page to an article titled “Yes, the middle class has been disappearing, but they haven’t fallen into the lower class, they’ve risen into the upper class.” This received the following response:
75k is not “Upper class”. To reach the top 20% household income needs to be about 250k/yr. To reach the 1%, household income needs to be about 1.6m/yr. This article is meant to quell the masses. If this article were true, the population would
Yaron Brook appears on alternate weeks on Leonard Peikoff’s podcast. This week he covers questions on:
Inspired by an image I saw on Twitter on Sunday, but of my own creation. It has been awhile since I have done much of anything in Photoshop, but I think it came out pretty well.
It seems I can hardly open Ayn Rand’s “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” without finding quotes worth sharing. This time it is about the difference between economic and political power:
Now let me define the difference between economic power and political power: economic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment,
Yesterday in the local paper there was a short article about the school district buying 60 iPads to distribute to some of the students.
Leaving aside such issues as how 60 iPads can be divided among several hundred students or whether iPads, in and of themselves, can actually aid students in actually learning (which I doubt), my main take away from the article is the economic ignorance on display.
As reported in the July 19, 2013 Caledonian Record:
School officials initially planned to purchase the
I have come to realize in the past year that property rights, especially as the affect real estate, do not really exist any more in this country. With property taxes, you effectively just “rent” your property. Here in Vermont if you are late on paying your property taxes, I forgot the exact amount of time, but it is not much, the town can proceed initiate proceeds for a tax sale. It doesn’t matter how long you have owned the property, you can lose it due to a period of
You would think it should be common sense.
If prices are arbitrarily set too low, more people will want to but the product or service and fewer will want to produce it, and a shortage results. If prices are set arbitrarily too high,more people will want to produce the product or service, but fewer will want to buy it, resulting in a glut.
One only has to reflect on the recent stories from Venezuela where, among other staple goods, there is a shortage of toilet paper. Why? Because the government