What are the main points I should get accross if I want to adequately represent the Austrian school?
key point: Individual demand is revealed through willingness to pay - if the price is right, you’ll pay for it. Thus, the only thing that is “overpriced” is the item that isn’t sold. If it’s sold, the price was right and someone demanded it.
Also important - demand is infinite, supply is finite. Economics is of course about supplying infinite demand with scarce resources…
Main point? There is no such thing as too little demand!
Thanks so much for the responses. The first class went great - tons of interation with the students. Definitely threw in some Austrian flair! Thanks for the suggestions, everyone.
The most important Austrian point on demand curves is that they’re just an heuristic representation, they don’t exist and cannot be observed as the continuous curves depicted in the graphs in reality; demand in real life is a discontinuous phenomenon constituted by the buying of different products by real individuals on the market.
It cannot really be infinity. I think that for any product at a time an infinite demand will even contradict the law of marginal utility. See Salerno’s video lecture on demand and exchange on the main page where he also argues, in a different way, that there cannot be infinite demand - or infinite supply for that matter.
I would call demand “unlimited.” We don’t live in the garden of eden, so are needs and wants are never fully satisfied. We must continually consume food or we die. Same goes with water. I believe most of us always want bigger and better things. We always want the next biggest house, the fastest computer, etc. For a particular product, this could be true. No single product will have “infinite demand.” Wants and desires though, are always infinite.