“Unfortunately, no one listens to economists.”
~Gustave de Molinari(1852)
I have written some short essays on the following topics. The idea is to dip into the past to see what I can find that is relevant to things that are going on today.
What typifies the phenomenon of the boom-bust cycle is that it is recurrent. What is the reason for this?
Loose monetary policies set the platform for various activities that would not emerge without the easy monetary stance. What loose monetary policy does here is to engineer the transfer of real savings from wealth generating activities to artificially stimulated activities, which we can label as bubble activities.
Forget performing William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The real art form is politicking. They sport taxpayer-funded windbreakers, speak with authority and urgency, and lead a brigade of specialists.
In my lifetime, I never have seen anything dominate news coverage like the COVID-19 virus and how federal, state, and local governments have dealt with the death, illness, and uncertainty it has created. That is a lifetime that has included the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the moon landing, Watergate, and the 9/11 attacks.
Years ago, Leonard Read came up with a fine analogy for understanding what citizens want government to do for them. Now, it also provides insight into the current COVID circus.
Read’s analogy arises from the fact that since government has no resources that it does not extract from its citizenry, it can only benefit all citizens when it can make more efficient use of resources than they can. Consequently, we must ask where government has a comparative advantage over voluntary organizations.
