The world would be a happier place if official economic statistics had never been created. They are often inaccurate or otherwise flawed and misleading. An even more serious consideration: official statistics help to provide rationales for pernicious policy making.
Crystal meth is a horrible drug, but it is also a cheap date, the poor man’s cocaine.
Crystal meth is a horrible drug, but it is also a cheap date, the poor man's cocaine. During cocaine's heyday, meth was nearly extinct on the illegal market. Then came the war on cocaine.
If the cost of labor increases, someone has to pay for it. Laborers may pay in the form of decreased work opportunities, investors may pay in the form of decreased returns on capital, or consumers may pay in the form of higher prices required by increased costs.
Hoover's interventionist policies focused on labor markets with the goal of keeping wages and employment high. Bush's interventionist policies focused on capital markets with the goal of keeping financial markets functioning.
Most Austrians stop short of following Chicago School economists' advocacy of the "efficient-markets hypothesis" (EMH). In its most extreme form, the EMH becomes a caricature of itself in which asset bubbles are not just unlikely but logically impossible.
The famous physiocratic tenet that only land is productive must be considered bizarre and absurd. It is certainly a tremendous loss of insight compared to Cantillon, who identified land and labor as original productive factors, and entrepreneurs as the motors of the market economy.
