In August 1971, President Richard Nixon enacted comprehensive wage-and-price controls in a misguided effort to contain inflationary pressures. (Contrary to the faulty memories of some Americans, this initial round of controls wasn’t due to the OPEC oil embargo, which didn’t occur until 1973.) Free-market economists like to use the long lines at the gas pump as a great teaching example of the problems with price controls.
Article 1, Section 10, Clause 2 in the Constitution of the United States has been instrumental in making the US economy the powerhouse that it is today. How so, you say? It did so by curbing individual states’ ability to impose tariffs on goods and services coming from or going to other states. This has made the United States a free trade area from its founding in 1789.
Many times, when a social problem is closed to being solved or has a positive dynamic that signals that the end is near, it is usually when a great part of the population realizes the mere existence of the problem and organizes politically to end it. The great stories of poverty left by Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist) and Victor Hugo (Les Miserables) contrast with the substantial improvement of living standards of the population in the industrial age.
This week, the Commerce Department reported that consumer spending was heading upward, thanks in part to the strongest sales in six months for automobiles.
For the automobile industry, that’s reassuring, but the larger trend points to a period of stagnation.
Students of free enterprise usually trace the origins of pro-market thinking to Scottish professor Adam Smith (1723–90). This tendency to see Smith as the fountainhead of economics is reinforced among Americans because his famed book An Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nation was published the year of American independence from Britain.
Governments were threatening trade wars with retaliatory tariffs and quotas, belligerents suffered currency devaluations and balance of payments deficits, and everyone threatened legal action. The United States and Japan in 1995? No, this situation described the relationship between the states in 1780.
When lampooning the various arguments for trade barriers, Murray Rothbard would like to try to use the arguments offered against foreign trade to trade between states themselves.
As he wrote in Making Economic Sense:
25 years ago this morning, FBI tanks were busy collapsing the home of the Branch Davidians atop their heads. FBI was also gassing the children, women, and men - leading to a conflagration that left 76 people dead. Waco shows that it is not an atrocity if the U.S. govt. does it - that federal aggression against Americans will often be ignored by the media - and that Congress cannot be trusted to expose federal outrages.
Nostalgia for the past — either our own past or just general times past — is a powerful emotion, and it often manifests itself in an image of the past in which times were “simpler” and people lived a slower-paced, easier, more comfortable lifestyle. Oh sure, people didn’t have the luxuries they had today, but they were satisfied with what they had, and used their large amounts of leisure time to build bonds with family, and pursue the simple things.
