Prices

Recorded at Mises University 2009.

In the UK as well — thanks to nationalization, price controls, and government rationing of healthcare — thousands of people die needlessly every year because of shortages of kidney dialysis machines, pediatric intensive care units, pacemakers, and even x-ray machines. This is America's future, if "ObamaCare" becomes a reality.

Almost invariably, furthermore, the union is not trying to discover the market rate, but to impose various arbitrary "principles" of wage determination, such as "keeping up with the cost of living," a "living wage," the "going rate" for comparable labor in other firms or industries, an annual average "productivity" increase, "fair differentials," and so forth.

Income is a category of action; it is the outcome of careful economizing of scarce factors.

On a competitive market there is no such thing as a price policy of the sellers. They have no alternative other than to sell as much as they can at the highest price offered to them.

Artificial credit created by a deceptively low rate of interest leads to speculative bubbles.

Market prices turn incomprehensibly complex relationships into very simple ones.

"All of this government intervention will only spawn new malinvestments and later depressions."

The wealth that strip-club patrons and strip-club moguls thought they had to throw around was but an illusion, and the reality is sobering for the entertainers, cabbies, politicians, and others who have been riding the strip-club boom.

The real threat to humanity comes from governments growing ever more powerful in the name of fighting climate change.