Every generation produces its slew of mouthpieces for state power at the expense of freedom. Statist economists are some of the most sophisticated of these, for three reasons.

In the 1964 film The Pawnbroker, Rod Steiger plays Sol Nazerman, a Holocaust survivor who operates a pawnshop in Harlem. In one memorable scene, his young assistant asks him what he believes in. “Money,” he answers. Money has extraordinary powers. It can buy comfort, luxury, relief from pain, sometimes even life itself. Then he adds, his anger driving him:

This week in New York, under the banner “Restoring trust, managing transformation,” the world’s diplomats convened for the 81st UN General Assembly and decided, somewhere between the wars and the climate panic, that artificial intelligence now belongs on the short list of things only they can save us from.

According to the non-aggression principle, aggressive violence is never justified. But stating the principle is the easy part. Identifying the aggressor is more difficult when the facts are contested and when both sides, in their respective political parties, claim to be “defending” themselves against their aggressive enemies.

Private market discipline is dynamic: prices adjust continuously as participants update their perceptions. Public prudential regulation is static: fixed rules define the playing field, and market participants optimize within those rules, arbitraging every gap. Once public regulation and ownership crowd out private discipline, political overseers add conflicting social objectives that further distort incentives. The 2008 crash was not a failure of free markets but the catastrophic consequence of unleashing Wall Street finance quants on a socialized housing market.

The Meaning of Socialism by Michael Luntley (Open Court, 1990; xviii + 206 pp.)