George Reisman

This blog is a commentary on contemporary business, politics, economics, society, and culture, based on the values of Reason, Rational Self-Interest, and Laissez-Faire Capitalism. Its intellectual foundations are Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism and the theory of the Austrian and British Classical schools of economics as expressed in the writings of Mises, Böhm-Bawerk, Menger, Ricardo, Smith, James and John Stuart Mill, Bastiat, and Hazlitt, and in my own writings.

Many writers have commented on the theoretical achievements of George Reisman's powerful book, Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics ... Not so many have mentioned the wonderful preface, which tells the fascinating story of the author's intellectual development and how the book came to be written. ... Dr. Reisman's account of how he came to study at the feet of both Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand is fascinating. He attended von Mises's famous NYU graduate seminar while still in high school and translated two of his books from the German. He met Ayn Rand through another student of Mises, Murray N. Rothbard.

The state of California has experienced a meltdown in its electric power system. For months, the system has repeatedly run at or near the overload point, necessitating brownouts and even rolling blackouts. Incredibly, the fiasco has been blamed on deregulation and the free market ... Presenting knowledge of the actual causes of California's electric-power fiasco will prevent the enemies of the free market, such as the New York Times and its columnists, from getting away with blaming the free market for the consequences of the anti-free-market, destructionist policies they advocate.

Paul Krugman is at it again. In Monday's New York Times, in his official capacity as a professional bleeding heart "liberal," he once again revels in his role of flagellating the pursuit of happiness with the whip of human misery. Specifically, he denounces the prospect of the impending Senate vote to abolish the estate tax ... Krugman and his ilk actually care nothing whatever for the welfare of the poor. For them the suffering of the poor is merely a weapon with which to beat down the aspirations and success of the rich, which alone can elevate the poor.

Today ... is the one-hundred-and-twenty-fifth anniversary of the birth of Ludwig von Mises, economist and social philosopher, who passed away in 1973. Mises was my teacher and mentor and the source or inspiration for most of what I know and consider to be important and worthwhile in these fields ... He himself should be awarded an immediate posthumous Nobel Prize ... He deserves to receive every token of recognition and memorial that our society can bestow. For as much as anyone in history, he labored to preserve it. If he is widely enough read, his labors may actually succeed in saving it.

The doctrine of Mr. Spence respecting consumption is not less worthy of examination than his doctrine concerning production ... Have we not seen that when a country is prosperous, the laboring classes of the people are by necessary consequence in comfortable circumstances? that when the comforts of the laboring classes have decayed, the prosperity of the country is at least at a stand, a point from which declension is the consequence, natural and very difficult to be avoided? Since the subject is then of so much importance, let us hope that all those whom the opinion here stated may offend, will exert themselves to refute it.

James Mill (1773-1836) is perhaps best known as the father and educator of John Stuart Mill. He deserves to be remembered for much more, however. Not only was he an influential popularizer of the ideas of his friend, David Ricardo, but also, as appears from the excerpt here presented, an important economist in his own right. ... One of the things the attentive reader will be shocked to discover as he proceeds, is that the doctrines which Mill attacks, and which, therefore, are older than his own, are precisely those which are today considered modern!