Thankful for the Market Process

     We have come a long way from the village farms and deer hunting ways of the first Thanksgiving and a lot of that is due to the institutional framework here in the United States. The constitution set up a system of limited government in contrast to more controlling regimes of kings, queens and aristocracies. This allowed for the growth of modern America and the wonderful things we can be thankful for this Thanksgiving. Markets move to please and allow grocers to compete for the attention of local consumers through Turkey Price Wars. I can find everything I need for my Thanksgiving meal by walking into my local Wegmans. This is a product of the market process alive and well.


     As George Mason University's Dr. Walter Williams would say, these grocers are "serving there fellow man". We can only imagine the logistics behind getting food from farm to grocery store and ultimately your table this Thanksgiving day. The market process is easy to see when we look at our pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce. Do you have to know the conditions cranberries or pumpkins grow in to purchase them? No of course not, you just exchange your value dollars for the cranberries and pumpkins and you are off to a delicious Thanksgiving. Things like the seamlessness of food infrastructure exist because of the market process. We might have to bear the slight pain of a packed grocery store, but the food is there for us.


     On behalf of the George Mason Economics Society I wish all of you a Happy Thanksgiving and may the rest of your holiday season be full of good cheer.


Michael Levesque is a senior economics student at George Mason. He currently serves as the Market and Creative Director of the Economics Society. He lives in Fairfax and loves to bike on the George Mason Cycling Club. You can find him on twitter: @tylerlevesque and his blog Let Markets Decide.
Note: Image found on Wikipedia. Originally in the Library of Congress Archive.

Happy Thanksgiving! Quotes We Live By:

"If people can access the same stuff by working less, they will. Plymouth settlers faked illness instead of working the common property. The harvest was meager, and for two years, there was famine. But then, after the colony's governor, William Bradford, wrote that they should "set corn every man for his own particular," they dropped the commons idea. He assigned to every family a parcel of land to treat as its own.
The results were dramatic. Much more corn was planted. Instead of famine, there was plenty. Thanks to private property, they got food -- and thanks to it, we have food today.
...Private ownership does good things. Be thankful for it this week."  
- John Stossel on Reason

Quote Our Professors :

“...the fundamental problem with aid; there’s a lack of accountability and responsibility and one of the basic lessons in life, one that we teach children, is you have to have consequences to your actions or you won’t act responsibly. Yet when it comes to spending billions and billions of dollars we don’t seem to hold politicians and aid practitioners to the same standard and therefore they waste the money." 

-Christopher Coyne on John Stossel discussing Doing Bad by Doing Good

TODAY Liberty Lecture ft. Tyler Cowen :

Tyler Cowen will be lecturing on "Is Average Over in an Age of Great Stagnation?"
Tyler Cowen has a PhD in economics from Harvard University and is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University.

When: Thursday, November 14
 5:30 pm Pizza
6:00 pm Lecture
7:00 Q&A
Afterwards Social Hour at Brion's Grille

Where: Johnson Center Cinema 

Econ Society & The Future of Freedom Foundation host Liberty Lecture Series on a monthly basis.

See you tonight ! 

Quote Our Professors :

“...We like to tell ourselves this myth that innovation is at this all time high...we do have a lot of innovations of some kind, and we need to be very careful with this word innovation; We are in some matter incredibly innovative. What we are not doing at a rate comparable to that in the past, is coming up with innovations that significantly improve the lives of ordinary Americans."  

–Tyler Cowen, 2011 speech on the  The Great Stagnation

Undergraduate Contribution by Abdullah Khurram :

The Iran-Pakistan pipeline: Finding the win-win for Pakistan is an article written by Undergraduate Economics student Abdullah Khurram published in Dawn.com.

 

Clip: 
"The government’s strategy on the IP pipeline has been dominated by the issue of financing the Pakistani leg of the pipeline, public pressure stemming out of acute power shortages and a political consensus that demands standing up to the threat of US sanctions. However, an overemphasis on these three factors should not hamper our ability to analyse other important dynamics involved in this project..."

 

Read the full article on our 'GMU Undergraduate Contributions' Tab Above.

 

View full article on Dawn.com

TODAY : Graduate Student Lecture Ft. Zachary Gochenour :

Zachary Gochenour is a Graduate Student and Professor to George Mason University.
His lecture features his work concerning the Political Externalities of Immigration.

When: Monday, November 11, 4pm
Social Hour Afterwards at The Rathskeller 

Where: Johnson Center, Room D

This Week :

Monday November 11. 
4 pm
Graduate Student Lecture:
Zachary Gochenour
Topic: The Political Externalities of Immigration

Thursday November 14. 5:30pm
Economic Liberty Lecture:
Tyler Cowen
Topic: "Is Average Over in an Age of Great Stagnation"

Learn more about our events in our "Upcoming Events!" tab.

Mason Professor Lecture Tonight : Dr. Ekaterina Brancato

Join Econ Society for Dr. Brancato's lecture featuring her work on
"Markets vs Hierarchies: A Political Economy of Russia from the 10th Century to the Present."
When: Thursday, November 7, 6:30pm

Where: HUB Room 3 & 4

Past Lecture Video : Ed Crane

Edward H. Crane, founder and president of the Cato Institute, gives a speech on George Mason Universities Campus, hosted by Econ Society and the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Lecture Highlight :

 

"There are people who want to run everyone’s lives and there are people who don’t want to run everyone’s lives. Which are going to be voted into politics?

                                                                 Lecture Highlight:

"The issue is not what causes poverty. Poverty is mans natural state. The issue is What causes wealth creation?"

Lecture Highlight:

Question to Ed Crane from audience: How much would you blame the way the government has controlled the educational system, because it seems that the children are being taught things that just aren’t true but there is too little complaints about it now?

Ed Crane's Answer: “The bad news is what they were taught. The good news is that they didn’t learn anything.”

 Watch Ed Crane's Lecture