Booming home prices and record low interest rates are allowing homeowners to refinance their mortgages, "extract equity" to increase their spending, and lower their monthly payment! As one loan officer explained to me: "It’s almost too good to be true."
My impression is that we are now working with the most educated and most exposed generation ever. Rather than going through grade school and high school with only appointed texts, the students have the opportunity to seek out other points of view.
In recent years an increasing number of economists have understandably become disillusioned by the inflationary record of fiat currencies. They have therefore concluded that leaving the government and its central bank power to fine tune the money supply, but abjuring them to use that power wisely in accordance with various rules, is simply leaving the fox in charge of the proverbial henhouse.
With the ousting of head man Saddam Hussein, the production of security completely collapsed. While I saw burgeoning businesses in fence building, satellite dish installations, used car sales, and agriculture in southern Iraq, the production of security floundered.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute has published a new edition of Murray N. Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State, and united this great treatise with Power and Market, which was originally written as the final section of the book but was published only eight years later.
Popular contempt for the market is distressing. Few institutions are so universally reviled, and perhaps fewer institutions are so universally misunderstood.
Blaming free trade for the present predicament of so many workers is misplaced. But who should be blamed?
In the game Monopoly, owners of land and houses and hotels, through acquiring their possessions by luck, are flattered into believing they are masters of the universe, extracting profits from anyone who passes their way. There is no consumer choice and no consumer sovereignty. This is not a small detail.
That some factors of production are mobile, says the new protectionist, "proves" that free trade is not as attractive as (supposedly) David Ricardo argued. But factor mobility is not new. It has long been accepted by economists that either goods or people (and other factors of production) move.
Given the reality that markets are self-regulating, how did the US economy (not to mention economies of other nations) become a morass of hundreds of thousands of state, local, and federal regulations that govern things to the minutest detail? Furthermore, why have we not seen a revolt of business owners and consumers alike, who ultimately pay the price for the modern regulatory state? The answer is both simple— and complex.
