Incredible Hulk and Bruce Banner aside, union leaders have been exercising a new right won by court case called "bannering". In these cases, businesses that don't have union labor can be the subject of protest, even if the employees in the business itself have no dispute. Kathy Hoekstra of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy reports:
If you have already registered, pass this on to your friends! If not, what are you waiting for?
Think more, sleep less.
The Institute for Humane Studies and Students for a Free Economy will host a weekend seminar at Northwood University in Midland, MI titled, “Exploring Liberty”. This seminar brings together students and faculty to discuss topics in Political Philosophy, History, Law, and Economics to discover what makes some societies prosper while others struggle.
If you ever longed for an opportunity to sit around with intelligent people and discuss big ideas in depth, this is your chance.
We'll provide all the meals and lectures free of charge! The seminar will begin at 3:00 pm on Friday, April 1 and run through 4:00 pm on Sunday, April 3. There is no charge for the seminar, but spaces are limited, so please only sign up if you are committed to attending. If you are coming from outside Midland, we may be able to provide lodging for you on a first-come first-served basis.
Topics include:
What causes economic crises, and how to resolve them?
Where does law come from?
What is the proper governmental response to environmental disasters like the BP oil spill?
More information and registration:
I admit this freely: I like drinking things just above freezing. I like my water to numb the nerves in my mouth and make talking all but impossible. I don’t know why this is, or what possible long term side effects it will have, but I do know that it requires a simple but often overlooked household staple: ice cubes. Yes, the simple ice cube. It’s a simple variation of one of the most abundant substances in the world: water. And yet from this, we can garner some fundamental economic truths: stages of production, the value of savings, the act of consumption, demand, supply, and others. Here, I will focus primarily on the merits of savings and the act of consumption, but will touch briefly on the idea behind ice cube production.
For those of you always blessed with having automatic icemakers, don’t fret. I will explain the process to manually create ice cubes with gripping detail. It will be enough for you to understand the process, even if you can’t appreciate it. For the rest of us, we understand that in order to have ice cubes, when you want them, requires foresight. One cannot simply believe that ice cubes will replicate in the freezer, into perpetuity, without some sort of initiative of the demander.
So what do we do? We dutifully fill those plastic trays under the faucet, and as steadily as possible march them to the freezer and set them inside. We close the door, open it immediately and poof! Ice is created, right? Of course not. Ice takes time. It’s not something we create instantly using household appliances. The lesson: every act of production requires a period of time. You must know what you’re going to make, and then plan accordingly. Production requires foresight and time. (It requires other things as well, but the sake of this argument, we’ll leave those alone).
Now, you wait the appropriate amount of time, open the freezer, and voila, ice is waiting for your use. You may do with it what you will. Chock that glass full of it. Make your brain freeze.
But do you? When you make ice for yourself, do you always take everything you make and use it immediately? Sometimes yes, but often no. The reason? You understand once that ice is gone; you’ll have to create more. Perhaps you don’t want to use all of the ice. (Here we’re dealing with another property of economics: the law of diminishing marginal returns. No matter how much ice you cram into a glass, at a certain point, adding more cubes will not make the water any colder.) If you’re ambitious and a heavy ice user, you’ll make more as soon as the other batch is complete. You anticipate needing more sometime in the future. This is another important facet of economics: the act of saving.
If you don’t use all of your ice cubes today, you’ll still have some left for tomorrow. Who knows, you might want a frosty lemonade tomorrow. Or a cube to cool down your coffee. Or ice to make a frozen margarita. The future is unknown, and you have limited ability to judge what you might want or need. But why save? Couldn’t you just make ice as needed? Why bother taking the time now to create more than you need?
Imagine the other side of this: do you ever make just one ice cube? Would you ever anticipate wanting to drink an iced water tomorrow, and make a single cube today? Why wouldn’t you? Maybe you understand that your time has certain priorities, and filling up your waking hours creating and then consuming one cube becomes a little tedious.
So naturally, you fill your trays, let them freeze and then consume them at your leisure. You do this, without prompting. You always fill the trays completely with water because… well it just makes sense, doesn’t it? There is no mandate that you keep your freezer stocked with ice. Sometimes you must go without. Sometimes you make too much and take extra time to dispose of them. Sometimes something in your freezer contaminates the taste of the tray. Sometimes you urgently need more than you can make, and go purchase it.
“So,” you ask the author, “what the heck does this have to do with anything?” The answer? Plenty. Imagine a world where, a governing beverage body told you to use all the ice you have. “Some of you have too much ice in your freezer,” they’d say, “and all the things you could use the ice with are just waiting to be sold! It’s your fault that the beverage, margarita mix and snow cone suppliers are going out of business. Stop saving your cubes! Use all your cubes, and continue to drink more! Once you’re out of ice, go buy more ice! Once all the ice is gone, drink the stuff warm! The market is lagging!” They want you to go into an ice deficit and drink things warm. Shudder at the thought.
This is a silly, hyperbolic analogy for what the Fed and the federal government are asking you to do with your money. You labor to earn money. You save some, because if you used it all today, what would you use tomorrow? They’re asking the banks to lend more (even if they’re not comfortable with the risks and returns). They’re asking you to spend more (even if you see nothing that you should buy).
To add insult to injury, bureaucrats are not alleviating the feeling of uncertainty in either camp. By shifting policies continuously, federal government is creating an environment diametrically opposed to spending more. People are beginning to save more of their money in the face of this uncertainty. People are starting to acknowledge the future as more opaque.
So what’s the solution?
Don’t listen to government, despite their pleas. You know best how to use your money (and ice cubes if you want to continue the analogy). Save what you like. Prepare for the future. In the end, you’re responsible for your own well-being.
I admit this freely: I like drinking things just above freezing. I like my water to numb the nerves in my mouth and make talking all but impossible. I don’t know why this is, or what possible long term side effects it will have, but I do know that it requires a simple but often overlooked household staple: ice cubes. Yes, the simple ice cube. It’s a simple variation of one of the most abundant substances in the world: water. And yet from this, we can garner some fundamental economic truths: stages of production, the value of savings, the act of consumption, demand, supply, and others. Here, I will focus primarily on the merits of savings and the act of consumption, but will touch briefly on the idea behind ice cube production.
For those of you always blessed with having automatic icemakers, don’t fret. I will explain the process to manually create ice cubes with gripping detail. It will be enough for you to understand the process, even if you can’t appreciate it. For the rest of us, we understand that in order to have ice cubes, when you want them, requires foresight. One cannot simply believe that ice cubes will replicate in the freezer, into perpetuity, without some sort of initiative of the demander.
So what do we do? We dutifully fill those plastic trays under the faucet, and as steadily as possible march them to the freezer and set them inside. We close the door, open it immediately and poof! Ice is created, right? Of course not. Ice takes time. It’s not something we create instantly using household appliances. The lesson: every act of production requires a period of time. You must know what you’re going to make, and then plan accordingly. Production requires foresight and time. (It requires other things as well, but the sake of this argument, we’ll leave those alone).
Now, you wait the appropriate amount of time, open the freezer, and voila, ice is waiting for your use. You may do with it what you will. Chock that glass full of it. Make your brain freeze.
On the first day of class, my High School Political Economy teacher wrote on the board – “Praxeology: The study of human action.”. He then drew two branches from Praxeology – one of them read “History: What Happened,” while the other read “Economics: Why It Happened.”
Austrian Economics is a specific lens to view and study the world—the ‘why things happen,’ so to speak. As Economist Steve Horwitz notes in his post What Austrian Economics Is and What Austrian Economics is NOT, “[Austrian Economics is] an approach to the study of human action and the social world.” Austrian Economics provides us with certain tools to analyze human action—whether it be understanding historical, current, or future human behavior.
The Austrian School of Economics was founded by Carl Menger in 1871 at the brink of the Marginal Revolution and continued on by his followers Eugen Bohm-Bawerk and Friedrich Wieser. Menger, Bohm-Bawerk, and Wieser all held faculty positions at the University of Vienna in Austria—and thus formulating the name, ‘Austrian Economics.’ Since its founding, the Austrian School moved to Great Britain and the United States and in the 20th century, economists Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek became the leading scholars in Austrian Economics. While the School contains a wide variety of influences and is integrated with a number of thinkers, there are ten main propositions of Austrian Economics. I adopted these from Economist Peter Boettke’s post on Austrian Economics from the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. For a more detailed analysis of Austrian Economics, please read Peter Boettke’s post.
To see more, along with the original post please go here.
