Bernanke's remarks were long and ponderous, Fedspeak plus excerpts from a typical intermediate-macroeconomics textbook. One thing this newest piece of Fedspeak surely won't do is give us maximum employment and price stability.
Everywhere we find some warlike tribe of wild men breaking through the boundaries of some less-warlike people, settling down as nobility and founding its state. The goal is always the same: exploitation.
Even though these economists — especially Diamond — are very smart and productive, they and their colleagues have hardly helped the plight of the unemployed, as we stumble ever deeper into depression.
The technique of the historicists’ indictment of capitalism is simple indeed.
Under socialism, the costs of one person's decisions are spread equally throughout society, to the point that that individual hardly feels the penalties of his value judgments — short of illness and death.
The well-known problem of the tyranny of the majority is present in both corporate/investor democracies and political democracies. What sets one apart from the other are the remedies available to the disgruntled minority.
It's strange how most people are willing to give the police and the courts the benefit of the doubt and pretend as if the system somehow knows something that we do not know. Anyone hauled off to jail, they believe, probably deserved what is coming to him.
Libertarians have not come to promise human beings a technocratic utopia; we have come to bring everyone freedom, the freedom of each individual to pursue whatever his or her dreams of the future may be. Or even to have no vision of the future.
Caplan could just as easily have written, "An optimal solution to education would actually involve gang members randomly beating up college freshmen." I am not exaggerating. Caplan's statement is literally equivalent to my own suggestion.
Government spending — whether on our current armed forces and their more than 800 foreign bases or on "green" energy and other government-favored projects — does not produce prosperity. It only diverts resources.
