Barriers to entry alert: do late entrants have a chance
22 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, Austrian economics, economic history, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, liberalism, technological progress Tags: Austrian economics, barriers to entry, creative destruction, Israel Kirzner, market process
September 21, 1999 – Google came out of beta; the 17th search engine to officially enter the market.
Kirzner defines a competitive market as a market where no potential participant faces non-market obstacles to entry:
Following a long tradition in economics going back at least to Adam Smith, Austrians define a competitive market not as a situation where no participant or potential participant has the power to make any difference, but as a market where no potential participant faces nonmarket obstacles to entry.
(The adjective “nonmarket” refers, primarily, to government obstacles to entry; it is used to differentiate such obstacles from, for example, high production costs that might discourage entry. These latter do not constitute noncompetitive elements in a market; to be able to enter means to be able to enter a market if one judges such entry to be economically promising-it does not mean to be able to enter without having to bear the relevant costs of production.) That is, a situation is competitive if no incumbent participant possesses privileges that protect him against the possible entry of new competitors.
The achievements that free markets are able to attain depend, in the Austrian view, on freedom of entry, that is, on the absence of privilege.
Climate Consensus: Do Little for Now
16 Sep 2014 1 Comment
in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, economics of natural disasters, environmental economics, global warming, health economics, liberalism, technological progress Tags: climate alarmism, cost benefit analysis, global warming, moral panic, richer is safer, wealthier is healthier
Churchill on capitalism
14 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, constitutional political economy, market efficiency, Public Choice, public economics, technological progress Tags: capitalism, Winston Churchill
Proctologists from outer space alert: what would you do if you had just travelled many light years to visit Earth?
04 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
Film review – Elysium
03 Sep 2014 Leave a comment
in constitutional political economy, development economics, economic growth, entrepreneurship, history of economic thought, law and economics, liberalism, P.T. Bauer, politics - USA, property rights, Public Choice, Rawls and Nozick, technological progress Tags: democracies, movies, rule of law, The Great Enrichment
Elysium was on TV. When I saw it on the big screen, no one told me it was a depiction of contemporary capitalism and the class war.
I read it as a contrast between third world countries lacking the rule of law and capitalist democracies.
The ships shooting up to the space station reminded me of Cubans trying to cross into the USA by boat to Florida.
Sorry, but I am just a simple country boy from the back blocks of Tasmania.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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