Steven Horwitz

Government interventions have changed the elasticity of wages, making it harder for firms to hire workers.

Markets do what planning can’t; allow us to figure out how best to combine the economy’s various capital goods to serve human wants.

Allocating goods by ability and willingness to pay isn’t a perfect method of distribution, but it has important advantages over the alternatives.

Horwitz reviews The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World by Virginia Postrel, an economic history of the textile industry.

When we change the rules so that people’s freedom to innovate is no longer restricted, they can discover new and better approaches that might have been impossible before.

The classical liberals knew it was unjust for the state to play favorites. Modern libertarians should bring back their conception of “privilege.”

A just society requires just institutions.

The key to thinking like an economist is to ask: Is it worth it? As compared to what?

Remembering an “extraordinarily earnest” musician who believed in striving for excellence.

Advertising alerts consumers to the existence of options they didn’t know they had.

Taxing private wealth isn’t putting idle resources to use; it’s uprooting resources already being put to productive ends in the economy.

The principles of sound economic analysis shouldn’t be tossed out the window when they’re politically inconvenient.

When dire emergencies loom, like catastrophic hurricanes, price controls do everything but help alleviate the situation.

There are two sides to every economic exchange, and regulations that affect one necessarily affect the other.

The economic fallacies tackled here are the zero sum game, that order requires design, & that consumption is the key to growth.