The Obama stimulus package has been less than a total success if one is to compare what was predicted to what has been delivered to date. The crux of the problem is that the economic planners have ignored or failed to take into account the secondary effects that increased government spending has...

Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850) is primarily known for his writings in economics, especially in the area of international trade. However, he worked as an accountant in his early years and some of his writings take an accounting approach. This paper will examine the influence of accounting on his...

Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was a journalist and economic theorist within the French liberal school. He is best known for his writings on free trade and protectionism. Although he has written several classic short treatises, his work has been ignored by most modern economists. This paper will...

In his Wealth of Nations (1776) Adam Smith created an agenda for the study of the economy that is reflected in the structure of modern economics. This paper describes Smith's contributions to four central areas of economic theory: The theory of price formation, the relationship between market...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith stand on opposite sides regarding their appraisal of commercial society. The citizen of Geneva is known as one of its most harsh critiques, whereas the Scottish philosopher is considered as one of its main advocates. However, both authors coincide on one...

Henry George and the Austrians disagreed on whether land is inherently different from other factors. Beyond this, they had much in common. The paper specifically argues that the similarities between George and the Austrians are derived from a similar underlying approach to choice. Both relied on...

Adam Smith is commonly referred to as one of the first who thought of foreign trade in terms of an international division of labour, whereby each country specialises in the production of certain goods. It is argued that he made a strong case for foreign trade on this basis. In this article, I...

One way to show that text interpretation can be treated as a scientific problem is to show that the standards that are currently used in the natural sciences when dealing with problems not involving meaningful material can also be successfully employed in the case of text interpretation. These...

At age 17, Adam Smith accepted a Snell Fellowship to Oxford, agreeing to be ordained as a minister of the Church of England. Smith did not fulfill this obligation. Instead, Oxford officials agreed to allow him to transfer from the Ordination to the civil law tract; and, later, to leave Oxford...

The present essay provides a detailed investigation of how Lewis revisited classical and Marxian concepts such as productive/unproductive labor, economic surplus, subsistence wages, reserve army and capital accumulation in his influential investigation of economic development. The Lewis 1954...