Mises Daily

It's a hard truth for Americans to face that neither team in Washington is going to guard what we love the most. That is something we are going to have to face. Liberty is for the citizens to guard themselves.

What permits real economic growth is an improvement in the investment infrastructure of the production process. What makes the improvement possible is real savings.

"If buying stuff is the way to promote recovery, then nobody can top the DC politicians."

The present crisis is not a crisis of capitalism but a crisis of state interventionism, and it is also a consequence of a mechanicist approach to economic problems.

Ubel mocks those who speak of a "nanny state"; but the real problem is not that the state officiously looks out for our best interests at the expense of our freedom. It is that the state exploits us.

Throwing money at Flynt and Francis — like bailing out the automakers and the big banks — stifles innovation and new technologies in order to keep outmoded business models in place at the expense of taxpayers.

Finally, let us remember that there is a word that can never be discussed or even mentioned when we talk about the myriad flawed federal, state, and city transportation systems.That word is "privatization."

I wrote Meltdown in order to give the free-market point of view the advantage of being one of the first, if not the first, of the inevitable avalanche of books on the crisis. (Paul Krugman, as well as the editors of The Nation, have published books of rehashed columns, but those don't count.) I also wanted the free-market point of view to have the advantage of a book-length defense in the first place.

Instead of trying to abolish failure via bailouts, we should let markets work, let failure run its course, and be so much the wiser for it.

Obama's head is filled with myths and lies, not only about FDR and the New Deal but also about the government's power to repair the existing economic problems. With this model in his head, he can only do evil. This must change.