J. B. Say argued that commercial crises were the results of effective demand failures, except, unlike Malthus he did not naively attribute effective demand failures to overproduction given some absolute limit on people's willingness to consume. Instead, Say built a theory of recessions based on...

The meaning of Say's Law may seem an issue of little relevance to economists today. It would seem, on the face of it, of interest only to historians of economics. Whatever Say's Law might mean, the one thing we economists know, or at least think we know, is that it was comprehensively refuted by...

Some of the literature on entrepreneurship suggests that the term entrepreneur was first introduced by either Cantillon or Say during the industrial revolution in the 18th and early 19th centuries. This article, by contrast, shows the term and the concept to be far older. Moreover, before the...

Henry George and the Austrians disagreed on whether land is inherently different from other factors. Beyond this, they had much in common. The paper specifically argues that the similarities between George and the Austrians are derived from a similar underlying approach to choice. Both relied on...

When it comes to entrepreneurship, the conceptual framework of economics is disjointed: on the one hand most everyone agrees that entrepreneurial initiative and creativity are critical for economic progress. On the other hand neither initiative, nor creativity, plays any role in formal models of...

To clarify Say's arguments on gluts and effective demand, this paper offers a formal mathematical restatement of his arguments on the relationships between markets. In the process, the paper demonstrates that what we now refer to as 'Say's Law' is a ludicrous caricature of Say's actual...

According to Susan Hamill, Judeo-Christian ethics call on us to raise marginal tax rates. Hamill bases this on the belief that higher taxes will yield more income redistribution to the poor and make them better off. Whether or not tax policy ought to be based on religious criteria is beyond the...