Value and Exchange

New York State Attorney General says that fantasy football is just as bad for you as the State Lottery. The lottery is actually much worse!

There were many state and local elections in the US this week, but few of them will result in anything that will combat widely held and popular errors about central banking, drug prohibition, and the global environment.

Without markets, there is no way to manage scarce resources, and this includes natural resources like forests. Only markets can provide the sort of balanced long-term planning necessary to both utilize and preserve natural resources.

The Fed's Federal Open Market Committee renewed its commitment to easy money this week. The Fed will pretend to be committed to raising rates while doing nothing, and its ongoing war against deflation will continue to make us poorer.

Government planners are fond of dreaming up new ways to force people out of their cars. But automobiles have long been a boon to ordinary working people who can access less expensive goods and better jobs because of them.

Neoclassical economists make too many assumptions and decree that the desires of consumers must conform to some external definition of what's "rational." But consumers like to decide for themselves what they want, and when they want it.

No amount of fantasizing can make fundamental economic realities go away, no matter how much we put our faith in central banks, government regulation, or technologies of the future.

Anti-capitalists often claim that employment is like slavery. But unlike slavery, employment in the market is voluntary, non-coercive, and makes the employee better off than he would have been without it. Employees merely choose an employer that provides the best alternative to non-employment.

Millions of pop culture consumers have been affected by the "post scarcity" world portrayed in Star Trek. But even in Star Trek, the claims of having overcome scarcity are belied by the fact that human lives, planets, starships, and time all remain scarce.

Robert Shiller, in a new screed against capitalism in The New York Times, asserts that government regulation makes countries rich. He then bolsters this argument by making stuff up.