Bernanke — with Paul Krugman looking over his shoulder and telling him where to put the paddles and how many volts to shock the patient with — thinks he can crunch the data, make a diagnosis, concoct the right monetary witch's brew, and inject lots of it to make us all employed and living happily ever after.
When governments try to confer an advantage to their exporters through currency depreciation, they risk a war of debasement. In such a race to the bottom, none of the participants can gain a lasting competitive edge.
Part of the experience of reading Newsweek in the early 1960’s was a weekly column called "Business Tides." It offered wide-ranging and insightful commentary on just about anything that had anything to do with the economy or with economics.
By their nature, capital goods cannot be redistributed among the people in any sense that results in equality and wealth. The redistribution of wealth, if taken seriously, necessarily means the complete and utter destruction of wealth.
Central bankers cannot be trusted with the printing press, especially when there is no formal check on their inflationary policies. It is no coincidence that gold is hitting such heights as investors the world over hunker down for what may very well be a collapse of the dollar system.
In 1824, the Spitalfields Act of wage control for silk weavers was repealed after being in force for 50 years. The act was essentially a disaster that devastated the industry and the workers.
Weighing in on the side of John Locke, not only on interest rates but also in a general and comprehensive vision of economic laissez-faire that even surpassed Locke, were two brothers, Dudley and Roger North.
There is a fundamental fact about the world that has profound implications for the supply of natural resources and for the relationship between production and economic activity on the one side and man's environment on the other: the entire earth consists of solidly packed chemical elements.
If it were not for the police, lawlessness and chaos would rule; therefore, we owe our safety, our civilization, our very lives to the selflessness and dedication of the police; thus, police are our "heroes." So we were told, and so we believed.
It is a hopeless task to interpret a symphony, a painting, or a novel. The interpreter at best tries to tell us something about his reaction to the work. He cannot tell us with certainty what the creator's meaning was or what other people may see in it.
