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William Barnett Ii, Walter E. Block
Involuntary Unemployment
Summary:
Our claim is that in the purely free enterprise system, there can be no such thing as involuntary unemployment, as long as wage demands are in accord with expected productivity, as perceived by the potential employer. Seeming counter examples are shown to violate one or more of these conditions. Nevertheless, there is great resistance on the part of professional economists to this axiomatic claim. The second part of the paper attempts to probe the cause of this resistance, and finds in praxeology, a rejection of Keynesian economics and psychological analysis, the cure for it.
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William Barnett Ii, Walter E. Block
Scale of Values Violates Singularism
Summary:
There is at the very least a tension between two basic building blocs of Austrian economics. The doctrine of singularism maintains that choice is inevitably and necessarily between two and only two things: that which is chosen, and the next best alternative, which is set aside. However, implicit in the concept the scale of values is the claim that choice can take place over many, many alternatives. If one of these has to be jettisoned, and we argue that one must be, then we vote for the latter.
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William Barnett Ii, Walter E. Block
The Rate of Time Preference: a Praxeological Oxymoron
Summary:
In ordinal utility analysis, one can but prefer or set aside. A person can choose option A or option B. Chalk or cheese, guns or butter. There cannot be any such thing as a rate at which a man engages in such activities. Cardinality cannot enter into the picture. No one prefers a given amount of chalk twice as much as cheese. This basic praxeological insight should not be lost sight of when we enter the more complex realm of time preference and interest rate determination. And yet, it commonly is. For we all speak of a “time preference rate.” This is an oxymoron and a praxeological monstrosity. The present paper is devoted to promoting clear thinking by attempting to purify economic language, so as to jettison the concept of a “time preference rate.”
