Pencils, Invisible Hands and Broken Windows | Mark Thornton

Presented by Mark Thornton at "Contemporary Issues in Economics," a high school seminar hosted at the Mises Institute and sponsored by Jeremy S. Davis, 18 November 2011.

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[PrivateAckbar]

I'm not just a libertarian, I'm classically liberal to the core. Every single one of my childhood friends is now a Socialist and I never fell into it. The invisible hand should make perfect sense to anyone who is ever going to be free.

[KeepGoing11235]

Wonderful talk. Should be the first lecture given to highschool students, college students, and...bureaucrats. Oh and especially voters and everyone else.

[quinnrasta]

Manufacturing is coming back to North America because of the rise in wages in China, that couple with logistics costs, along with transportation time etc, is bringing it back here. The irony of the situation is, the manufactures cannot find skilled labor to do the jobs that have been over in china for the last 20 years. If you want to help poorer people than you should promote jobs in china, unless you are a nationalist

[quinnrasta]

@SeanMauer So do you think the people in China would be better off with no job, I bet they would beg to differ with your assertion, actually if you promoted that there the workers probably would not let you out alive. You must remember, societies do not come into this world with high wages, roads, infrastructure etc All of that is accrued over time, the US used child labor because we had to, but as we became more advanced we switched to high skill and to an older labor force.

[lonewolf1369]

@SeanMauer then very few people will buy an iPhone so there will be fewer jobs making them. You clearly don't want to admit the basic facts of economics. There is no such thing as race to the bottom, wages are determined by productivity. You can go to Botswana and demand that everyone be paid $30 an hour, it's not going to make everyone rich. We don't even know why we have to keep hitting our heads to keep proving the point to you socialists over and over again...

[SeanMauer]

Jobs to China - first it's bundled here with two no-brainers, I suppose that's credibility by association. But right now we are in a race to the bottom. Not everyone is gifted in engineering. Those average people who want jobs better be prepared to move to China and join the work camp. We're supposed to believe it's ethical to promote slave labor to save money on the cost of i-Phones? If we want to conduct a moral civilization we should be willing to pay $1,200 - $1,500 for an i-Phone.

[SeanMauer]

The invisible hand of Walmart is going to wrap around your throat until you cry uncle and accept $5.00 a day.

[jsem94]

This is a GREAT speech.

[synestheticmonotony]

Bad, BAD little boy! Haha

Great speech, Mark.

[fnyklr]

@jrikus It is something about this labor arbitrage that does not feel right. I am all for free trade if something makes more sense to make somewhere else. Such as it does not make sense to grow bananas on the north pole. But the Chinese are not "better and brighter" assemblers. The only reason is the price for a human being is much lower over there for a number of reasons. It seems that the price of a human in the US will converge towards the price of a Chinese factory worker.

[jrikus]

@fnyklr He didn't explain that part very well, but i believe he was referring to the value added of the iphone being $490. So Apple employees and owners would have 490$ of created wealth to spend in the economy on other goods and services which would create more demand and jobs to service them. The value added from the chinese laborer was $10. While lots of americans would want that $10 job, its because of regulations and taxes that it would force the cost of iphones over $1000.

[godfather89]

@SouthernCross33 Its not Communism/Socialism its Corporatism, the merger of State and Corporate Power. ;)