Thorsten Polleit writes (originally in German):
“Market competition brings results that satisfy the wants of its participants. The market brings more goods and better goods at ever lower prices. And just as competition in the market for books, sneakers and crayons work well, so would a free market for money also work.
In a recent paper cited last month in The Economist, a trio of economists ran a kitchen sink’s worth of correlations on investment numbers. Kothari et al. concluded that profit growth and stock price boost investment, but that interest rates have a negative effect.
Although his main work was dedicated to a critique of socialism, Ludwig von Mises paid much attention to the analysis of what is known as the “mixed economy,” the “middle-of-the-road policy,” or “interventionism.” In Mises’s eyes, interventionism faced two main difficulties. On the one hand, interventionists could often themselves see that the outcomes of their interventions were even worse than the problem they intended to solve.
This talk was delivered at the Costa Mesa Mises Circle on Society Without the State, November 8, 2014.
The term “anarcho-capitalism” has, we might say, rather an arresting quality. But while the term itself may jolt the newcomer, the ideas it embodies are compelling and attractive, and represent the culmination of a long development of thought.
[From A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, first published in 1989, shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall.]
“Trade, not aid” said the current prime minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif. It was six years after its 1947 independence from India that Pakistan experienced a near-famine due to two failed crop seasons from lack of monsoon rains. Meanwhile, Pakistan didn’t have enough hard currency to buy wheat on the international market. The US State Department considered Pakistan on the brink of starvation, so President Eisenhower gained approval from Congress to send one million tons of wheat (known as the Wheat Aid Act), thus beginning Pakistan’s tragic addiction to US foreign aid.
From the moment it became obvious Tuesday’s Republican wave would make shore, media mouths began talking up the problems its leaders would face in converting a widespread rejection of Obama’s policies into a positive agenda. Given that the abusive centralization of power was the core of what the electorate was saying no to, leaders would do well to focus on restoring Constitutional federalism.
