Many moviegoers might recognize the following quotation: “with great power comes great responsibility.”
Reality, however, is the exact opposite of what the quote describes. In reality, it is responsibility that precedes power. In a corporation, for instance, when you’re hired you are told your responsibilities and the powers granted to you are those that are necessary for you to accomplish your responsibility.
According to many economic experts and commentators, an effective way to generate economic growth is through the lowering of taxes. The lowering of taxes, it is held, is going to place more money in consumer’s pockets thereby setting in motion an economic growth. This way of thinking is based on the popular view that a given dollar increase in consumer spending will lift the economy’s gross domestic product (GDP) by a multiple of the increase in consumer expenditure. An example will illustrate the magic of this multiplier.
States like Texas, Florida, Arizona, and Colorado are experiencing an influx of migrants from other states. Often, these migrants come from so-called blue states like New York, California, and Illinois — all of which are sending more people to other states than they are receiving in return.
The result is, in many cases, a net movement of Americans from the more leftist “blue states” to the more conservative “red states.”
Mr. Mark Lautman has given me permission to share the following letter:
When I started reading Rothbard’s book, I gave the three-line summary to my wife. “It’s a book written by Murray Rothbard in the 1950s about libertarian economics. It’s published by the Mises Institute. Rothbard was a disciple of an Austrian economist Mises.”
“Mises?” she asked. “Ludwig von Mises?”
“Yes. Do you know about him?”
“Do you know who Ludwig von Mises was? He was my grandfather’s cousin!”
According to the most recent Census Bureau data on state-to-state migration flows, 523,000 people moved to California from other states. But at the same time, more than 661,000 Californians moved to other states.
That is, on net, nearly 138,000 more people left California than moved into it from elsewhere in the US.
Most economists are familiar with the controversy on the possibility of economic calculation under socialism, and with the fact that Ludwig von Mises and Oscar Lange were the two major protagonists of that debate.1 Many are also familiar with Lange’s ironic gibe that, for having posed the problem which Lange believed that sociali
