Wherever the doctor is being paid by the authorities and not by the patients, the outcome of compulsion is a set of fees that does not cover the investment in expensive instruments. This has an additional effect that could scarcely have been unintended: It forces the patient into governmentally controlled dispensaries which can afford the investment — at the taxpayer's expense.
But if the government itself prints additional dollars, then it is legal and it increases the quantity of money. And this is the monetary problem. Apart from the fact that this brings about a very bad situation for those people who were not receivers of the new additional money, because they have not received more money, they now face higher prices.
"There is no point in making plans unless causal determinism is true; yet, if causal determinism is true, the very basis of central planning is destroyed, because the government planner is himself determined. By a strange lapse of logic, the believer in causal determinism always excludes himself from the system which he is putting into effect."
Cowperthwaite, along with many Austrian School economists, has proven that economics is only a dismal science when interventionist economists insist on making it one.
Every state needs justification. And the justifiers are always welcomed and cheered by the state. So we should not be shocked that a false science — a science that props up the state — is embraced by the state and associated sycophants.
"Governmentalizing, and thereby controlling through an appropriate bureaucratic apparatus, the providing of medical, accident, and old age care and of death (burial) benefits seemed an obvious way to put the reins on laissez-faire capitalism as well as on labor."
Socrates' conversation illustrates the logic of the politics of plunder and injustice in the polis. Socrates is able to do this because of his audience's lack of a definition of justice.
So no matter what GDP numbers the Commerce Department spins out, the interest rate Chairman Bernanke controls will stay low "for an extended period."
Presented to the Auburn University Economics Club; Auburn, Alabama, on 25 March 2010. Includes a Question and Answer period.
Rival explanations — for example ones that claim government deficit spending doesn't help an economy — fit the evidence far better.
