Mises Daily

By outlawing short selling, the Securities and Exchange Commission outlawed a practice that produces information necessary for financial markets to function smoothly.

Economic knowledge gets more valuable as the economy worsens; but the economy worsens according to the level of political intervention — which is a function of economic ignorance.

For the economy and country to begin healing, we need capital, credibility and authority to move from the wasteful to the productive. The power elite, predictably, is attempting to achieve the exact opposite.

Q: So what's the solution?

A: Get out of the way. Let the market work.

Many laboring in the thriving cottage industry of Hayek biographers, critics and interpreters have commented on the transition from a "Hayek I" to a "Hayek II" that began in the late 1930s, portraying it as almost wholly an intellectual re-orientation and change in research interests. Few, if any, have recognized the radical alteration in analytical procedure and rhetorical style that characterized this transformation.

Personally, I am still a long-term optimist, but as a student of the Depression I know that Congress and the executive can do much damage before the long term gets here, and indeed, they can delay its arrival indefinitely.

Middle America has traditionally been the largest and most effective force of resistance to the imperial garrison state.

Economic agents in general and companies in particular can only rehabilitate their finances by cutting costs (especially labor costs) and paying off loans.

If the market is left to its own devices, the price will be an accurate reflection of what something is worth at a given point in time. When the government intervenes, it forces the prices to lie: the signals about the costs and benefits of different actions will be distorted.

Nothing government can do can take away our freedom; and if we are a people who are truly free, the government will have to follow.