Videos: Political Economy

Wealth can be usefully understood in terms of opportunities to improve the quality of our lives.

Trade allows people in one place to benefit from the advantages available in some other place.

When competition presents sellers with the risk of loss, the hope of profit forces them to give consumers more of what they want for less.

Because it costs something to find opportunities for exchange, there are profit opportunities in providing the valuable service of helping other people make deals.

Prices are an amazingly simple solution to the mind-boggling problem of discovering where resources would have their highest-valued uses, when the knowledge necessary for that discovery can only exist scattered across all the different people on the planet.

Entrepreneurship is the act of discovering new ways of moving available resources to higher-valued uses that no one else has imagined so far.

The motives that guide people's actions in the private sphere also guide their actions in the political sphere.

The rationale for a property right is not the personal merit of the individual owner, but the fact that a system of property rights permits exchanges that move resources to those who can create the most value with them.

Removing something from an unowned state can preserve that resource for the future and make it more productive for everyone.

Different ways of protecting and enforcing property rights make it possible in different circumstances for a social system of property rights to keep working for mutual benefit.

When property rights emerge within a social group, they do so because they help groups solve resource problems they can no longer afford to live with.

A legal system that allows everyone to know who owns what makes it easier for people to make deals with each other, and this makes it easier for people to use the things they own to create wealth and escape poverty.

A lot of work in classical economics -- like Marx' work -- is easier to understand when you grasp the fundamental picture of economic value, exchange, and production that people were working with at that time.

What Marx' vision for a new economic order was -- and what it wasn't.

Busting the seemingly obvious myth that things are regularly sold for more than what they are actually worth.