individualism for the masses

BK Marcus is an amateur political economist with no formal education in the subject.

He works from Charlottesville, Virginia, as an editorial consultant for the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

He is no longer a house husband, nor a faculty spouse, but he is still a dilettante, and a layabout, at least in spirit.

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"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."

Murray Rothbard

Benjamin Tucker Marcus
June 18, 2008

W.H. Hutt and the economics of apartheid

May 31st, 2007 by bkmarcus

Today's daily article at Mises.org is Lew Rockwell's "Three National Treasures" — about Henry Hazlitt, Murray Rothbard, and … W.H. Hutt.

Anyone who knows anything about Austrian economics has heard of Hazlitt and Rothbard, but who's this Hutt guy? I admired his article " The Factory System of the Early Nineteenth Century," which I had read in Hayek's Capitalism and the Historians, but I hadn't remembered his name. He was a classical liberal in apartheid South Africa — a position that can't have been too popular with either blacks or whites at the time. As Rockwell writes,

"Hutt showed that South Africa's economic apartheid was designed largely to protect white labor union members from black competition. The free market, he said, offers the only hope to minorities and the disadvantaged, and for a free society in South Africa. Government controls benefit only loot-seeking special interests."

He's worth reading about.

Posted in LvMI |

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