In 1928 Herbert Hoover rode the coattails of Calvin Coolidge into the White House, and everyone thought he would hold the line on taxes, for he talked of “individual freedom” and criticized his opponents as “socialists.”
Few occurrences have been more dreaded and reviled in the ‘history of economic thought than deflation. Even as perceptive a hardmoney theorist as Ricardo was unduly leery of deflation, and a positive phobia about falling prices has been central to both Keynesian and monetarist thought.
Governments have always intervened in the economy, but today’s State—armed with modern data collection as well as an interventionist ideology—has taken us to a new level of regulation and taxation.
Faced with this, people find less costly ways to work, produce, and exchange, even if it means doing so unofficially. This is one reason the State can never achieve total economic control—witness the underground economies in the socialist world.
Ludwig von Mises disliked hardboiled detective novels because he always knew who the murderer would be: not the butler, but a prosperous and respected gentleman of high social standing who pretends to virtue, but is actually a hidden criminal and sanctimonious hypocrite. Mises saw egalitarian envy in such tales.
Dear Sir:
I noticed the following headline in the New York Times recently: “Earnings Plunge at IBM—Quarterly Sales Fall Across Most of Line.” Another Times story reports that IBM “has been pushed out of the personal computer and software spotlight by its software partner, the Microsoft corporation.” A third article reports that 21 computer makers are forming an alliance—Advanced Computing Environment (ACE)—to create new standards for computer work stations in direct competition with IBM.
Environmental activists have recently uncovered a plot to destroy The Planet. A foreign race has managed to infiltrate our most pristine spaces with a simple but devastating scheme: to stomp, chew, and defecate The Planet into oblivion. They are perhaps the least suspect of our fellow fauna. They are The Cows.
Alan Greenspan has received his foreordained reappointment as chairman of the Fed, to the smug satisfaction and contentment of the entire financial Establishment.
For them, Greenspan’s still in his heaven, and all’s right with the world. No one seems to wonder at the mysterious process by which each succeeding Fed chairman instantly becomes universally revered and indispensable to the soundness of the dollar, to the banking and financial system, and to the prosperity of the economy.
