Preface to Reisman's Lectures on Capitalism Macroeconomics

1. To provide the student with a comprehensive knowledge of the operations of a free-enterprise, division-of-labor society, with special emphasis on the phenomena of money, production, real wages and the productivity of labor, profit, saving and capital accumulation, and economic progress. The consequences of government intervention with respect to these phenomena will be considered in depth. 2. To teach the student to think of economic phenomena in terms of their long-run effects on all groups, not merely their short-run effects on those directly concerned. OVERVIEW OF THE COURSE The course will focus on the current or recent problem areas of the banking system, unemployment, economic stagnation, budget and trade deficits, and inflation, in the light of the contrasting analyses of the Keynesian and “Classical” schools (the latter including the Chicago and Austrian schools). Policy solutions to these problems will be explored—in particular free-market wage rates, balanced budgets with low taxes, and limitation of money-supply growth versus expansionary fiscal and monetary policy. Two leading themes of the course will be 1) The possibility of continuous capital accumulation and economic progress based on the combination of economic freedom, private ownership of the means of production, division of labor, saving, and technological progress. 2) The ethical implication of the harmony of the rational self-interests of all men under these conditions. BOOKS FOR THE COURSE George Reisman, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Ottawa, Illinois: Jameson Books, 1996. Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson (paperback). George Reisman, editor, Supplementary Readings in Macroeconomics (to be distributed in class). [The essays contained in this title appear below with references to their original sources.] Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus, Macro-Economics (paperback), 15th Edition, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1995). (Optional) Ludwig von Mises, Human Action (paperback), Third Edition.