If there is anything that government is actually good at doing, it is destroying things. Strangely, love for this destruction has become a popular cause, revealed in the push for "sustainability" and the banning of technologies that improve our lives.
The Wikipedia entry on the real-bills doctrine advances the controversial proposition that banks can increase the quantity of money without diminishing the purchasing power of each unit. I will refer to it as the Sproul doctrine.
Nature does not generate peace and good will. The characteristic mark of the “state of nature” is irreconcilable conflict.
Hayek noticed that the British habit of proclaiming compromise to be ingenious is an excuse for closing the eyes to unpleasant facts. If there is anyone who is not entitled to put his trust in the genius for compromise and for muddling through, it is the modern planner.
What matters for individuals is not whether they are employed as such but the purchasing power of their earnings.
"Let the banks perish. … Now is the time for the complete emancipation of trade from legislative thralldom."
William Leggett (1801–1839)
Because they are based upon a falsehood, Keynesian policies fail empirically, quite obviously to anyone with an open mind.
There is, after all, the surprisingly favorable response that libertarianism encounters from people in all walks of life.
It is Republicans, not libertarians, who favor handouts to and special privileges for big corporations. And Republicans are not libertarians.
Coke's legal-economic philosophy might be summed up in a phrase he used in Parliament in 1621: "That no Commodity can be banished, but by Act of Parliament."
