Page 45 - Gary Becker News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Artificial shortages and panic buying, for example, are rampant during pandemics. In his account, Defoe noted an acute shortage of horses for hire even though people were hardly traveling, as well as frequent food shortages due to sellers’ stockpiling efforts. Fast forward to current times and the media is rife with reports of overpriced face masks, sanitizers and groceries, along with the curious case of the vanishing toilet rolls that magically reappear at local convenience stores for higher prices. Economics can predict this behavior. As the Nobel prize-winning economist Gary Becker p...

The Solstice Star or Christmas Star you are hearing so much about is not a star but two planets.  It will appear on Monday, Dec. 21, the winter solstice, the shortest day in the Northern Hemisphere, which happens to be a few days before Christmas. Also called "The Great Conjunction," the name refers to how Jupiter and Saturn will appear to be so close in the night sky. - Advertisement - They will look to our eyes like a single bright star rather than the giant gaseous planets that they are. This celestial event happens every 20 years, but this year Jupiter and Saturn will be the c...

The Shock Doctrine. Capitalism has always existed One of the first things you will be told about capitalism is that it has always existed. This is claimed by Adam Smith as well as the neoclassical economists. This is hardly the case for the entire school of Marxists and economic institutionalists who will tell you that capitalism is roughly 500 years old. In addition, no anthropologist will agree that tribal societies or even agricultural civilizations like Egypt, Mesopotamia, China or India had purely capitalist economic exchanges within their societies. Even external trade cannot be charact...

ORIENTATION Name me one country where socialism works When I first considered myself a socialist revolutionary in 1970, I was hounded by free marketers’ challenge: “name me one country where socialism works”. These market fundamentalists would then hold up the most strident expectations for socialism: Everyone is exactly equal with no classes. There is an abundance of goods which are conveniently circulated. Political rule is not dictatorial. All competition is banished. People are working together, collectively and creatively. The state has withered away. Anything less than this was pr...

RIP Walter E. Williams, a Great Economist and Friend George Mason Economics Professor Walter E. Williams passed away on December 1, 2020; he was 84 years old. On his last day on this planet he did what he had done for a career of some 60 plus years: taught his graduate course in microeconomics, published another one of his splendid op-eds, and undoubtedly, thought about his next book. A Black libertarian second only to the sainted Thomas Sowell in terms of accomplishment within this movement, Walter published ten books, over 150 articles in refereed journals and law reviews, and so many short...