When looking for a thorough and logically consistent analysis of broad market forces and the role of the Federal Reserve in promoting an unsustainable boom in long-term production, Tom Woods‘s Meltdown remains the best choice.
Within the space of days, we've been provided, courtesy of the Fed itself, with footage that perfectly distills the complete failure of Fed forecasting and planning, and audio that encapsulates splendidly the only thing that the Fed actually accomplishes: the destruction of money.
In the UK as well — thanks to nationalization, price controls, and government rationing of healthcare — thousands of people die needlessly every year because of shortages of kidney dialysis machines, pediatric intensive care units, pacemakers, and even x-ray machines. This is America's future, if "ObamaCare" becomes a reality.
Insufficiently educated in the history of economic thought, they do not realize that Keynesianism — down to the most technical details, like the concept of the foreign exchange multiplier — is mercantilism or, more precisely, John Lawism pure and simple.
The precept of methodological individualism has shown its usefulness in the explanation of the origin of money.
To make things even worse, the unintended adverse consequences of government "solutions" undermine the premier example of unintended positive consequences in society — the "invisible hand" of market mechanisms that arise from self-ownership and lack of coercion.
I wonder if Paul McCulley has ever entertained the idea that massive fiscal and monetary bailouts actually retard recovery?
Almost invariably, furthermore, the union is not trying to discover the market rate, but to impose various arbitrary "principles" of wage determination, such as "keeping up with the cost of living," a "living wage," the "going rate" for comparable labor in other firms or industries, an annual average "productivity" increase, "fair differentials," and so forth.
Careful examination shows that, rather than protecting the economy, it is loose monetary policies that are the key source of boom-bust economic cycles.
The true point of this experiment is to encourage people to educate themselves about our current inflationist monetary policy.
