Recently, there has been a scandal in the luxury fashion industry concerning “unethical business practices,” and without going into the history or nature of these industries, somethings are particularly disconcerting about the scandalizing itself.

An often-repeated saying among Arabs, widely believed to be the panacea to our political ills, goes like this: “The right person in the right position” by which we mean that if we insert the most qualified person for a specific job, many of the problems affected would be solved. This is a strong phrase since it seems to be irrefutable. After all, should we otherwise put the “wrong” person in any position? Conversely, should we not create the right positions for the right people?People not trained in economics would answer both questions in the negative – they seem too commonsensical to be questioned. Now, why would anyone want to throw a monkey wrench at this understanding? The aim of this article is to show that there is much more than meets the eye here, and that there are many problems

What is the Mises Institute?

The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard. Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.

Earlier this year, I gave a short course on Carl Menger’s Principles of Economics for scientists and engineers at my institute. The course was brief, and I focused only on ideas that were relevant for researchers in engineering and the natural sciences. One of the ideas we talked about was supply and demand, in order to link it to the supply and demand of research-related things: the labor of researchers, research articles on specific topics, and so on.What I told them was that supply and demand were not as simple as one would expect upon first encounter. We usually imagine the price of a commodity increasing if people “demanded” it more. What actually happens relates not to the prices of the items as they stand but their prices in a situation where all other things are held equal. Just as

It is as if the average human assumes that a coercive governance must be established or assigned despite the fact that such a government is often not very efficient or even involved in the outcomes we ultimately want, peace and prosperity.
—Walter Block and Stefan Sløk-Madsen, “Who Should Own the North Pole?“
In many oil-producing countries, governments own the resource (namely, oil) that they’re extracting. Whether this is a favorable state of affairs in matters of productivity and efficiency will not matter to us in this article. What does matter is that libertarians claim that government “ownership” of resources commits an infraction of the nonaggression principle.
This article will attempt to set to ink (or to bits) my sequence of thoughts regarding the issue. I will especially focus

In his Nations by Consent, Murray Rothbard reminds us that the concept of a nation “cannot be precisely defined; it is a complex and varying constellation of different forms of communities, languages, ethnic groups, or religions.”