From: Bart  Croughs <bart.croughs@tip.nl>
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 1996 19:47:21 +0800
To: "'cypherpunks@toad.com>
Subject: re: National Socio-Economic Security Need for Encryption Technology
Message-ID: <01BB88FA.25D2E3C0@groningen16.pop.tip.nl>
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Perry Metzger wrote:

>Perhaps I should start being more vicious when I'm using sarcasm.

>Nowhere in the writings of any Austrian economist will you find >anything
>claiming that the wages for a given job are linked to capital
>investment by the employer.

I already gave some quotes of Austrian economists in another post, but maybe you didn't read it, so here I go again:

	Henry Hazlitt in 'economics in one lesson' (p. 139): "The best way to raise wages, therefore, is to raise marginal labor productivity. This can be done by many methods: by an increase in capital accumulation - i.e. by an increase in the machines with which the workers are aided..."
	Murray Rothbard in 'the free market reader' (p. 31): "Wage rates are low in many foreign countries because capital equipment is small and technologically primitive. Unaided by much capital, worker productivity is far lower than in the United States."
	Lew Rockwell in 'the economics of liberty' (p. 26): "Wages are determined by the productivity of the individual laborer, which in turn is largely determined by the amount of capital invested per worker."
	
I could go on, but I think this will suffice.

As I already said in two of my other posts on this subject, when Austrian economists say that wages depend on the amount of capital invested, they mean on a regional/national level, not on the level of individuals.

Bart Croughs