Tag Archives: Classical economics

Brad DeLong shows how Ricardo's version of economic liberalism based on free trade explained by comparative advantage is bourgeois liberalism that enriches the ownership class. Washington Center for Equitable Growth Ricardo’s Big Idea, and Its Vicissitudes Brad DeLong | Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley

Interview with Vlado Plaga in the German magazine FAIRCONOMY, September 2017.VP: You are advocating a revival of classical economics. What did the classical economists understand by a free economy? MH: They all defined a free economy as one that is free from land rent, free from unearned income. Many also said that a free economy had to be free from private banking. They advocated full taxation of economic rent. Today’s idea of free market economics is the diametric opposite. In an...

This is an interesting point about Marx’s economic theory: he rejected the orthodox Classical “iron law of wages.” Nevertheless, there are still severe problems with Marx’s theory of wages.In essence, the Classical “iron law of wages” was derived from (1) the wage fund theory in Classical economics and (2) Malthusian population theory. The “iron law of wages” was, then, in view of (2) a kind of “law of nature.”By contrast, Marx rejected Malthusian population theory (Baumol 1983: 304, 305),...