Rothbard Graduate Seminar

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40 Tage mit dem Wort - Teil : 6 - Psalm 119 :20

The uniqueness of the Austrian approach to taxation is to first cover Public Policy, then Antimarket Ethics and finally Taxation. It is a praxeological development approach. Robbery and counterfeiting are the revenues to the state. You can't look at taxation alone, you must look at expenditures, too.Those resources will never be available to private producers. There are net tax payers and net tax consumers. No tax is neutral for the market. Any tax distorts allocation of resources by its level of taxes, not by its form of taxation. Additionally, a tax severs income distribution from production. Taxes cannot be shifted forward.Monetary inflation and credit expansion lead to boom-bust. All government expenditures are consumption; none are investment.General sales taxes and general income taxes lower the standard of living of the taxpayers and reduce saving and investment. If an employer is paying your health premium, he has lowered your income to do so. When employers pay some share of your social security payment, they have lowered your income to do so. There can be no tax on consumption alone; all consumption taxes are taxes on income. Inheritance taxes are the most devastating - a pure tax on capital.An Alice J. Lillie Seminar. This lecture covers pp. 1149-1191 in the Scholar's Edition of Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State.

The pricing, supplies, and incomes of particular factor prices - labor and land -  and the effects of a changing economy upon them are discussed as Rothbard viewed them. The theory of rent is a highlight of this chapter. The Mengarian causal-realist tradition is integrated here.The section on costs, vertical integration, and size of the firm add to the socialist calculation issue.An Alice J. Lillie Seminar. This lecture covers pp. 557-627 in the Scholar's Edition of Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State.

This completes the study of money and of the effects of changes in monetary relations on the economic system. Like all commodities, money has its own supply and demand and price: purchasing power. Everyone deals in money. The annual production of money is small compared to the total stock of money. Earning money is the name for buying money. The sole purpose of buying money is to exchange it in the future for other goods and services. Increases in the money supply yield no social benefits, unlike increases in other commodities. More money does no good if its purchasing power for goods is correspondingly diluted. Keynesians confuse the notion of saving with hoarding.  They also fear deflation and its falling prices. There are four components of the natural rate of interest. An Alice J. Lillie Seminar. This lecture covers pp. 755-798 in the Scholar's Edition of Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State.

The stock of the money commodity responds to demand and supply of the consumers and their preferences just as with any other good. Claims to money can be used as money, but fraudulent claims to money would be illegitimate because two owners cannot own the same thing at the same time and the pseudo receipts would add to the money stock. The issuance of pseudo receipts cannot be regulated by profits as it would be on the unhampered market. Thus, there must be 100% reserves in banking. Money can never neutral. Money is valued on preference ranks. Increasing the stock of money changes all these rankings. If you increase the supply of money, the purchasing power of each money unit will decline. Clusters of entrepreneurial error cannot lead to boom-busts. And there cannot have been any monetary credit expansion on a free market. An Alice J. Lillie Seminar. This lecture covers pp. 798-874 in the Scholar's Edition of Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State.

Praxeology - economics - provides no ultimate ethical judgments: it simply furnishes the indispensable data necessary to make such judgments. Common criticisms of the free market are refuted praxeologically in this chapter.Absolute equality is an impossible goal. Egalitarianism is a senseless social philosophy.All rights can be analyzed in terms of property rights. Free speech? You can say anything on your own property. Yelling fire in a theater is fraud against the ticket holders.An Alice J. Lillie Seminar. This lecture covers pp. 1297-1355 in the Scholar's Edition of Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State.

Walter Block met Rothbard in 1966. Here, Block tells a joke making the point that antitrust law is dead from the neck up.There is nothing wrong with a monopoly price. Whatever price the free market establishes will be the best price. There exists an unfortunate illusion about monopoly price. Labor unions, by exacting higher wage rates, do achieve identifiable restrictionist prices for their members, but only at the expense of lowering the wage rates of of all other workers in the economy.Patents are grants of exclusive monopoly privilege by the State and are invasive of property rights on the market. A copyright is a logical attribute of property right on the free market.An Alice J. Lillie Seminar. This lecture covers pp. 629-753 in the Scholar's Edition of Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State.

The mental constructs of the evenly rotating economy and of specific factors of production are discussed. Distinguishing between interest and profits and a construct of slow change are revealed through the ERE as Rothbard considers the final state of rest.The ERE construct is simply a useful, unrealizable, mental tool.The determinants  of price are only the subjective utilities of individuals in valuing given conditions and alternatives. There are no objective or real costs that determine price, despite what Marshall thought. Costs are nothing but payments to the factors of production.An Alice J. Lillie Seminar. This lecture covers pp. 319-365 in the Scholar's Edition of Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State.

Entrepreneurs see the future better than others and go and make money off it. Profits are an index that maladjustments are being met and combatted by the profit-making entrepreneurs. Capital does not beget profits. Only wise entrepreneurial decisions do that.The paradox of saving is that saving is the necessary and sufficient condition for increased production, and yet that such investment seems to contain within itself the seeds of financial disaster for the investors. The impact of net saving on the economy is to lengthen and narrow the structure of production. In an economy with increases in gross savings and investment, money wages and ground rents may well fall, but real wages and rents will rise. Technology, while important, must always work through an investment of capital.Refusal to maintain the value of capital is known as consuming capital. Profit and loss are the results of entrepreneurial uncertainty.An Alice J. Lillie Seminar. This lecture covers pp. 509-555 in the Scholar's Edition of Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State.

Rothbard's approach to money prices is not as a barter exchange system. Instead, he made money prices the common denominator for all exchange ratios. You can now engage in economic calculation. Every homogenous product will tend to be bought and sold at one particular money price at any given time. The money regression theorem is in this chapter on prices and marginal utility. There is no measuring or comparability in the field of values or ranks. Money permits only prices to be comparable, by establishing money prices for every good. Money is demanded and considered useful because of its already existing money prices. Regression is not infinite. The clue to its stopping point is the distinction between conditions in a money economy and conditions in a state of barter. Money must develop out of a commodity with a previously existing purchasing power, such as gold and silver had. Money cannot be created out of thin air by any sudden social compact or edict of government. An Alice J. Lillie Seminar. This lecture covers pp. 233-317 in the Scholar's Edition of Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State.

Direct exchange was limited. The pattern of indirect exchange led to the common medium of exchange: money. Maximization of psychic income always leads the seller of a good to seek the highest money price for it, and the buyer of a good to seek the lowest money price. All human action uses scarce resources to attempt to arrive at the most highly valued of not-yet-attained ends. An Alice J. Lillie Seminar. This lecture covers pp. 187-231 in the Scholar's Edition of Rothbard's Man, Economy, and State.