Many economists mistakenly believe taxation can be good for economic growth, that war can buck up prosperity, and that even natural disasters can spur wealth creation by causing people to spend. All of this is fallacy because it fails to consider the costs of destruction, the alternative use of resources, and the unseen effects of diverted uses of property.
The dollar may not die anytime soon but its capacity for lording it over all living things is ending.
It is the conviction of the liberal intellectual tradition dating back to the Middle Ages that society contains within itself the capacity for internal self-management. This is in contrast to the claims of the sociology literature, which posits that human society is riddled with conflict between groups: races, ages, ethnicities, and abilities.
Indeed, because a free market in space industries would be open to all competitors, we have every reason to expect technological innovation to be much quicker than in a monopolized space program.
Hans F. Sennholz, winner of the 2004 Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Liberty, is one of the handful of economists who dared defend free markets and sound money during the dark years before the Misesian revival.
Professor Mises had come to the United States in 1940 and joined the faculty of the Graduate School in 1945. At that time he had already published his Bureaucracy (1944) and Omnipotent Government (1944) and undoubtedly was laboring on his magnum opus, Human Action (1949) which built on its German-language predecessor Nationalökonomie.
If we continue to pay attention to authors like Schlosser and Ehrenreich who blame the free market for the problems we face, public support for the market will dwindle to less than it is already, and the prosperity that the free market generates will be destroyed.
The middle classes have always been the only dependable source for taxes. If a government really wants revenue, that is where they have to go.
The newest political cliché offered up by the Republicans speaks of the need for an "Ownership Society." To those of us who support private property, it might sound good at first. But let us think about this before embracing it.
It was capitalism that finally ended the Great Depression, not FDR’s harebrained cartel, wage-increasing, unionizing, and welfare state expanding policies.
