Quotation of the Day…
by Don Boudreaux
on June 14, 2018
… is from page 151 of Tulane University philosopher Eric Mack’s 1992 paper “Gauthier on Rights and Economic Rent” reprinted in the superb 1992 collection Economic Rights (Ellen Frankel Paul, Fred D. Miller, Jr., and Jeffrey Paul, eds.) (original emphasis; here Eric Mack uses the market for hockey sticks as an example):
The more [“perfectly”] competitive the world is, the more competitors sensing the gap between the return to the hockey-stick provider and his cost will rush in and bid down the price of these implements. At least the tendency of unrestricted competition will be to reduce returns to the cost of supply. In actual competitive economies, however, insightful will not imitatively ape the production and marketing of others; they will search out new ways of producing for new or as-yet-unexploited markets. The entrepreneur does not replicate the efforts of the existing supplier except to the extent that she hopes to marginally undercut his prices. Instead, she hopes to create or homestead a new market such that the gap between her costs and the value that her potential customers see in her product will be greater than the gap between the present supplier and his customers.
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