u/LibertyEconlover

I am a classical liberal in the sense that John Stuart mill and Ludwig Von mises was a liberal; with manifest destiny sprinkled on it.

About taxation; the thing about taxation is that it’s never a uniform solution because things are never uniform, for example, the Canadian and the huge amounts of land the federal government has it can help pay off national debt. Some things shouldn’t be funded like social programs, some things should be strictly voluntary. Also the land value tax is filled with economic fallacies

$10 billion a month spent on food when increases in productivity made it so that from 1950-2026 the average amount spent on groceries in the US went from 30% to 5-10% according to the Department of agriculture; it’s clearly unnecessary based on what recipients spend it on and these extra facts

1: “In 2025 and 2026, the average American household spent approximately 8.1% to 13% of its median income on groceries. The exact percentage is heavily dependent on location, with residents in states like Massachusetts and California averaging closer to 6.7%, while households in states with lower median incomes, such as Mississippi and Louisiana, spend up to 12% to 13% of their earnings on food at home.” If food is clearly this cheap although monetary policy is making it unaffordable relative to a few years ago, but historically it’s so cheap here in the US. There’s a reason our pizza is the way it is (Yummers).

2: The single parent problem amongst the black community;
As Thomas Sowell hammered down to us; According to economist Thomas Sowell, the poverty rate in the Black community was cut nearly in half over the span of a generation, dropping from 87% in 1940 to 47% by 1960. Sowell stresses that this massive 40-percentage-point decline occurred before the passage of major civil rights legislation or the creation of Great Society welfare programs, people can figure there life’s out, govt don’t need to come in.
When the expanded welfare state was introduced in the 1960s, Sowell argues that it slowed down economic progress and caused severe social retrogression, specifically by decimating the Black family structure. The government came knocking and now single parenthood amongst blacks is 60% today; Sowell points out that in 1960—after a century of enduring the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow—the vast majority of Black children (78%) were raised in two-parent households. By 1985, after two decades of welfare expansion, that trend completely reversed: 67% of Black children were raised in single-parent or no-parent homes.

3: as relating to the second point Thomas Sowell explained with a few words.. “what’s the point of producing when you can live off what others produce?” People have this misconception that these social programs are “steppingstones” or helping hand, but no, it’s a handout, which causes people to have their time preference raised instead of accomplishing low time preference, of course, especially with the single parent problem can teach people in welfare to have bad traits that naturally lead to bad social and individual outcomes

4: the helping hand affects that supporters of SNAP talk about is actually compensating for mistakes of government that stifles opportunity and makes things expensive. Minimum parking spaces (something the left and right agree on for different reasons, but overall has to go), property taxes, minimum wage laws, etc

The final note is this: “The National Park Service issues signs that say 'Please Do Not Feed the Bears' because the animals will grow dependent on handouts, lose their wild instincts, and fail to learn how to survive on their own. Yet, the government turns around and applies the exact opposite philosophy to human beings through the welfare state."

He did not study Austrian economics, or economics in general, what he did do is he looked up a bunch of thinkers and what they claimed to explain instead of their work and then critiques a bunch of their quotes.

Progressives are simpletons at economics from Capital in the 21st century to actually even having some so-called economists support rent control? Economics is getting turned into a field where the most anti-economic people actually fit in such as socialists, or they just don’t study enough for example AOC has a bachelors in economics?

Thomas Sowell is to a lot of people the first economist who started shifting them to the right path of common sense economics. Sowell is what I like calling Austrian adjacent, due to his books that he writes for the General public such as his famous basic economics and wealth poverty and politics.

Sowell is now 96 years old.

Happy birthday 🎉🎂

Sowell and his interviews at the Hoover institute

So economic textbook to my knowledge still use Robinson Crusoe model; the concept of using Robinson Crusoe, a man on an island to represent economic fundamentals, but of course, because of the physics envy they completely stripped away the humanity of a man just trying to make his life better, since they’re failing at using him correctly, let’s apply praxeology to it!

Let’s begin.

Praxeology:
The deductive science of deliberate human action and its logical implications.
**Axiom: “Humans act purposely to achieve a greater satisfactory state, to remove felt uneasiness, and/or to prevent them from slipping into a less satisfactory state, by using scarce means to achieve their ends.” (Or you can technically consider this anticipation, which is a greater satisfactory state itself by realizing they could potentially or would’ve been in a less satisfactory state.)
So you’re Crusoe stranded on an island. it’s hot, it rains, and you’re hangry. you’re gonna need to act to prevent **yourself from starving. As a result, you act:

Logical implication 1: Scarcity. There is scarcity because you need to act; if there were no scarcity, there would be no need to act. Through consciousness... action manifests. Therefore, every action happens in scarcity, due to scarcity, i.e., every purposeful action is an act of economizing scarcity (time, energy, etc.).

Logical implication 2: The mind and the ends. Human consciousness drives deliberate action. The mind anticipates a state where they are going to be either worse off or better off, and acts from there. Actions change the real world, so actions are the actual measure of someone’s value; therefore, value and cost/opportunity cost are completely subjective to the individual, rooted in the ends.

You go out of your way to try to catch fish and get coconuts for you to eat, but both of them are hard to get. One has you needing to climb; the other is a result of you using your hands, where the salty water gets in your face, making it hard to catch fish. You’re only capable of catching one fish a day. You can survive a week without food. After sitting down to eat your one fish, you start thinking about how you can make your life better. You get the idea of innovating a way to catch more fish, if you can extend your reach to grab a fish, you can do so more efficiently.

You decide to risk one day not catching fish to manifest your idea. At that current state, your idea is a spear which is a capital good. The spear needs rock and wood, which are inputs at that moment. You sacrifice the wood and rock to create a spear. But why is it a sacrifice? It’s a sacrifice because you could’ve used the wood and rock for something else, such as a campfire. I.e., subjective cost.
You eventually craft a spear, your output from the inputs that you put in. But then you switch to going back to fishing; you now possess the producer good, the spear a capital good used to get something, based on the subjective whim of your mind and your current state.

Logical implication 3: Subjectivity of goods. The inputs, outputs, consumer goods, producer goods, etc., don’t have their physical properties changed, but their** categorization as either an input, output, consumer good, or producer good is subjectively interpreted **by the actor.
You go out with your new spear to get fish. You managed to catch five fish that day. As a result, new opportunities arise; you can now allocate your time in a specific manner the way you see fit because you now have more resources available. You realize that you now have the ability to get more fish and coconuts while being able to eat the same amount as before for basic survival. You realize that, through time, if you do this you will accumulate a lot of coconuts and fish to be able to use those resources to sustain you in order to get more innovation.

Logical implication 4: Savings and time preference. By demonstrating a low time preference, you are capable of accumulating savings to then invest in things that increase your productivity in order for you to get more output, or the same output for less time, which leads to greater standards of living. This is how an economy grows. If you were to demonstrate a high time preference by consuming everything you get, well then you stagnate, you don’t improve anymore.

Logical implication 5: Say's Law. Say's Law has two real interpretations: a universal law of reality, and a law of markets. It is a strawman to say “supply creates its own demand.” With the universal law of reality version of Say's Law, the fact is that production precedes consumption; you can’t consume what hasn’t been accumulated/produced until it has.

So I decided to make a post about this theory because I thought a lot more people knew about it but they didn’t.

This is one of the theories that explicitly I stop myself from bringing up when I talk to Marxists because I’m scared to see how they would react since they can never get past subjective value theory without flipping out.

Subjective cost theory has been getting developed largely from Mises, but then it was finally settled with Buchanans book Cost and choice.
Buchanan is the same guy who won the Nobel prize in economics and started public choice theory, and constitutional economics or at least popularized it, I don’t think he’s considered heterodox in mainstream views.

But here is subjective value theory’s brother; subjective COST theory

Bookkeeping and The Natural World:

To first get your gears running and to smooth the rigidities of bad public education at least in my personal experience you should know that negatives are a bookkeeping invention meant to track direction, flow, and arbitrary measurements based on a subjective starting point. There is no such thing as a true -5 apples, in the sense that there are five ghost apples in another universe. There is no such thing as slower than fully stopped or negative speed; there is only traveling the opposite direction. It is an accounting identity simply.
If you were ever in math class, you might’ve seen a number line with negatives on the left, a zero in the center, and positives on the right. The zero could’ve always started at the far left, replacing every negative and then only stretching it to positive. Our world is a positive world. If you turn 180° left then right, you turned 180° both ways either way. Bookkeeping invention, as I said.
Strangely, no teacher ever explained it to me like that when I asked. They got flustered and just pointed to debt as a real-world version of negatives. But that’s still a flow, because you have to pay back debt with what? Positives. The world is a positive world. Now we should continue.

Fallacious Separation:

It is incredibly fallacious to separate cost and opportunity cost, as you will find out further; they are the same thing. Additionally, just like supply and demand are two sides of the same coin; as Say's Law puts it, so are value and cost. It is an accounting illusion to separate them because our world is positive; you can never have less than nothing physically. Cost and value are two sides of the same coin, as you’ll see, due to its subjective front.

The Theory of Subjective Cost:

Finally, the theory: Carl Menger and some classicals like the School of Salamanca introduced subjective value theory, with Carl Menger's notorious contribution on subjective value being marginal utility. But what wasn’t introduced is its cousin, subjective cost theory. Mises was very close to completion and paved the road for James Buchanan to finish it in his book. Cost and opportunity cost are completely identical, and both are purely subjective.
The theory (fact) posits that treating cost as an objective, measurable expense independent of choice is a fundamental logical fallacy. In this framework, cost is not a thing, a receipt, or a pile of resources. Cost is an act of sacrifice. You only experience cost at the exact moment you make a choice.

If there is no choice, there is no cost.

Therefore, the "cost" of choosing Option A is strictly the subjective value you placed on Option B (the opportunity you rejected). They are the same thing.
To highlight this, consider a few examples:
Firstly: When you spend five dollars on a coffee (inflation price lol), the reason why that is a cost to you is because of what you could’ve spent your five dollars on whether it be something else or later or what you could’ve done with that five dollars to be more broad. This means psychologically, if five dollars could do a lot more, you’d feel the cost more based on knowledge. Which means cost is limited by knowledge just like value, due to it being subjective.
Secondly: When you spend hours toiling in the sun as Crusoe on an island, and your friend Friday is spouting some STUFF about how labor is the source of value toiling away in the sun is a disutility/cost not just because of the grueling fact that you want to minimize it, but because of what you could be doing with that time. Assuming you have some sort of entertainment, you would much rather spend your time in leisure.

Buchanan's Six Logical Implications
To show how radical this was and is, Buchanan outlined six strict logical implications in Cost and Choice. If you accept that cost is opportunity cost, you must accept these six rules:

1. Cost must be borne exclusively by the chooser: It cannot be shifted to someone else, because only the chooser feels the pain of the rejected alternative.
2. Cost is strictly subjective: It exists solely within the human mind and cannot be measured by an accountant, machine, or third-party observer. (Hehe, this paves the way to private property theory).
3. Cost is entirely forward-looking (ex-ante): It is based on your anticipation of what the rejected alternative would have been like.
4. Cost can never be realized: Because you rejected Option B, you will never actually experience it. You are sacrificing a phantom future that you will never see.
5. Cost cannot be measured in money: Money is just a tool. The true cost is the enjoyment you thought you would get from whatever else you would have bought with that money.
6. Cost vanishes after the choice: Once the decision is made, the cost disappears. What accountants measure afterward is not "cost" it is just a historical record of spent resources.
   The Subjective vs. Mainstream Fallacy
   Mainstream economics and business accounting treat cost as objective and backward-looking (ex-post money paid out). Subjective cost theorists call this a fallacy because an expense sheet only tells you what resources left the building. It completely fails to capture the actual economic cost: What did the manager pass up when they signed that check? If the manager had two brilliant ideas and picked the wrong one, the business might show a financial profit on paper while suffering a massive subjective economic loss.
   The only things objective are inputs and outputs, but the use and cost of the inputs are subjective, for inputting something is a sacrifice of those inputs. And like Marx tried doing with sneaking in subjective value theory in the words "socially necessary" you can’t find out what is socially necessary until after evaluation of the human mind. The output's utility/value is subjective.
   This also paves a road to something I’ve been using against “stimulating spending” for a while now, which is the opportunity cost of money idleness. Essentially, because subjective cost requires choice, not acting with something or on something is also a choice. Where you have the freedom to not act, this causes an opportunity cost, or a cost in general, of idleness. So the simple act of holding onto inputs especially combined with deterioration is a cost itself, due to what you could do with those inputs now.
   But, of course, good luck quantifying that.

Every time whether it be a financial crisis or sustained “greedy lack of care for human life CEO” action, there is always a government behind it.

In the 1970s, the SEC a (technically unconstitutional from an originalist standpoint but ig we don’t care) government agency created during the you guessed it great depression where the most interventionist presidents were in office, implemented a rule, actually two rules.

The SEC originally used that authority to require only annual reports, moving to semiannual reports in 1955.
Finally in 1970 which has been the rule even now, the SEC implemented quarterly reports and requirements for corporations. as you know, every single government regulation and intervention has unintended consequences. Economically and then stretching to culturally and psychologically, which then becomes action making it economically again.

This regulation on top of removing us from the gold standard, is one of the root causes of why wages separated from tracking productivity neatly. The vast majority of workers do not get quarterly raises. Although I could frame this as a total failure for workers, i’d much rather point to the fact that entrepreneurship requires TIME. Time to save invest plan, this regulation made our companies very short term minded, it’s why you see corporations doing things that would normally be stupid in a sane world such as firing workers quarterly to boost the reports. Of course this also contributes to the things the left cares about such as CEO pay. But I care more about the fact that this regulation burdens entrepreneurs and forces capitalism to be short-term and not long-term, or well however, the individuals want it. Which leads to inefficient allocation of resources in time.

Hopefully we can bring back annual reporting, maybe also just allowing corporations to opt in either annually, biannually, and quarterly.

On money (De Moneta) or Nicole Oresme (1320–1382)
The Work: On the Origin, Nature, Law, and Alterations of Money. For the literal translation is seen to be one of the first economic treatise on money ever made, this book was written for us and princes, the economic theories are similar to that of Richard Cantillon and others, and is very relevant today.
Oresme wrote it during the Hundred Years' War to protest King John II of France, who was secretly melting down gold coins and mixing them with cheaper metals (debasement) to fund the war, destroying the economy.

Even though it was written in the late 1300s. The man understood the concept of straight to the point, each chapter is straightforward and delivers pure knowledge, no yap.
Very refreshing if you read a 400+ page treatise like human action.

In the Drive provided there is the original Latin and English bundle, with two other files in .TXT and .PDF that makes it even cleaner, removing OCR artifacts and more, made it myself with the help of Claude, amazing for reading and audiobook listening on ElevenReader or other apps.

Austrian economists frequently cite De Moneta because Oresme effectively outlined Gresham’s Law("bad money drives out good") centuries before it was formally named. He explained that when a king debases currency, people hide away the pure gold coins and only spend the diluted ones, ruining the market

Drive link for the files

It is believed or actually now that I confirm it a fact that Murray Rothbard read this, so if you want the original source enjoy!

I was absolutely shocked to see this,
I hate environmentalism. I remember when I was a kid playing, legend of Zelda breath of the wild and I hear Joe Biden on tv talking about paper straws in order for us to save the turtles.

I was young, so I wanted to save the turtles. Now I know these people SUUUUUHHHCK. No way people actually supported this and environmental regulation was actually being done in the west, it really just was a way to control and take money from the people.