Making the boom continue at home and abroad has been the prime focus of U.S. monetary policy for quite some time. But among the unintended consequences emerge the broadly based lowering of perceived risk levels in the financial markets and a global spread of careless investment activities.
My 7-year old daughter asked me the other day whether I was born before email. "Yes," I confessed. Then she quickly followed up: "Where you born before plastic?" "No," I said, "I was born after plastic but before email." Satisfied that she had placed me within the structure of the history of the world, she went back to her weekend play.
"Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else," writes Frederic Bastiat in his 1848 essay, Government, which may be the most insightful critique of America's government available today.
No government can live up to its billing as a semi-divine problem solver. Government intervention is not an alternative to the market; it merely creates a different kind of market full of con men selling very sour lemons.
Forest industry and other private timberland owners increasingly are burdened by environmental and other government regulations that in many cases constitute de facto seizures of their property rights.
Drug war-related injuries are bound to dominate the emergency room services of virtually all inner-city hospitals. And, although this incredible violence in America's inner cities is almost exclusively the result of the war on drugs, none of it should come as a surprise.
We tend to think of trade as low-grade war with winners and losers, but the reality is otherwise. A vibrant trade in agriculture with the Third World would mean that the masses of people in both the developed and developing worlds would benefit.
Instead of incorporating the agenda of those who would malign free enterprise, business schools should do more to educate tomorrow's corporate executives about the myriad ways in which business advances social progress.
As America's economy continues to struggle in response to Federal Reserve policy during the 1990s, and as regulators are given free reign during wartime, China could be poised to overtake the U.S. as the world's leading economic superpower within the next ten to twenty years.
Contrary to popular thinking, economics is not about GDP or CPI or other economic indicators as such, but about human activities that seek to promote people's lives and well-being. So what are the tools that economists and financial experts utilize in their assessments of the economy? What is the basis of their framework of thought?
