We've all encountered the rival theories Hunt is talking about here — the thinkers like Max Weber, who believed that the rise of liberalism was caused by the Puritan work ethic, the thinkers who believe that the rise of liberalism was made inevitable by Christian ideas about the individual soul, and so forth.When you're attempting to explain market processes, whether in the marketplace for goods and services or the marketplace of ideas, it's never that simple.
[This article is excerpted from chapter 20 of Human Action: The Scholar's Edition and is read by Jeff Riggenbach.]
Since states are created and directed by the boundaries of what people will accept as proper, since they exist only in the vacuum created by the public’s tolerance for aggression, the only lasting way to change the state is to persuade the public to rethink the program.
With medical costs continuing to rise, mostly due to countless previous interventions in the healthcare economy, the unemployed and downsized workers thought that at the very least their Uncle Santa should take care of their medical needs.
Wherever the doctor is being paid by the authorities and not by the patients, the outcome of compulsion is a set of fees that does not cover the investment in expensive instruments. This has an additional effect that could scarcely have been unintended: It forces the patient into governmentally controlled dispensaries which can afford the investment — at the taxpayer's expense.
Currently, the Mises Institute is not officially accredited. However, those who desire to do so can take a final exam and have the results posted online. In this way, economics majors can receive extra credit from professors friendly to the Mises Institute, and finance professionals can curry favor with their bosses if they are fans of the Austrian School.
But if the government itself prints additional dollars, then it is legal and it increases the quantity of money. And this is the monetary problem. Apart from the fact that this brings about a very bad situation for those people who were not receivers of the new additional money, because they have not received more money, they now face higher prices.
Advertising is not a scam at all. It is individuals sacrificing a level of product perfection in exchange for a level of product trust and time efficiency that cannot be fulfilled through word-of-mouth advertising.
"There is no point in making plans unless causal determinism is true; yet, if causal determinism is true, the very basis of central planning is destroyed, because the government planner is himself determined. By a strange lapse of logic, the believer in causal determinism always excludes himself from the system which he is putting into effect."
