Mises Daily

1.

Expect every government program to fail to achieve its stated aims – domestic and foreign – and you will hit the mark every time.

Our analysis shows that it is changes in past money supply, and not changes in the price of oil, that drive price inflation.

Mises's insight that interventions breed more interventions is as true in foreign policy as it is in domestic economy. And just as the logical endpoint of the cycle of economic interventions is complete socialism, so the logical endpoint of the cycle of military interventions is world conquest.

Beauty is in the eye of beholder and only an individual can make subjective valuation of a work of art based on the satisfaction that he derives from it.

What is really stopping a much-needed change is public ideology. So long as the political system encourages the idea that government is the savior of mankind, the solver of all human problems, the machine that will bring freedom to the world through tanks and bombs, we are going to have the problem of monetary instability.

It is private property and market prices or the law of the jungle, and no amount of fashionable cynicism about the market or romantic delusions about how nice life would be without it can obscure this fundamental choice.

History reveals that prohibitions are indeed classic examples of the co-opting of public-spirited intentions by rent seekers within the political process, thereby explaining the existence of what at first appears to be irrational policies.

Rent seeking is a search for privilege and personal gain through the political process. Rent seeking is distinguished from corruption in that rent seeking is legal and corruption is not.

Let's settle the scores; the politicians and bureaucrats win since they claim success based on programs implemented, the children lose due to additional years in state institutions, the teachers and their unions win as more money is pumped into the sinking barge, and the taxpayer — William Graham Sumner's forgotten man — continues to pay the bill year after year.