A mathematician and an economist were asked, “What is the sum of two plus two?” The mathematician immediately answered, “It is four.”
The economist, on the other hand, closed all windows and doors and asked quietly, “What do you want it to be?”
Earlier last year (February 17) in testimony before the House Banking Committee, Alan Greenspan argued that increases in productivity tend to create greater increases in aggregate demand than in potential aggregate supply. His reasoning was that productivity increases stimulate optimistic corporate earnings forecasts, which stimulate stock price increases, which lead consumers to assume increased personal wealth, which increases consumption (and thus aggregate) expenditure.
There is a class of pundits that defends public confidence in big government, and trashes those who celebrate its undoing. These pundits had a fit following this year’ s election that revealed the least flattering side of the US system of government. If we thought the process of making laws was ugly, few were prepared to observe in slow motion the even more contemptible process of picking lawmakers.
While it did not make headway in this latest presidential campaign, events of the last year have weakened one of the longest-standing policies of the US government: the trade embargo with Cuba. Born in the cold war fervor of the early 1960s and further strengthened by the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the embargo has survived the Vietnam War, the Great Society, Woodstock, Watergate, the breakup of the USSR, Monica Lewinsky, and the 2000 presidential election crisis.
I have come up with a brief list of films I’ve happened upon that I think are of particular interest to the cause of liberty. I am not vouching for ideological purity in any of these films, but they do underscore the case against managed societies and economics. Also, I have selected films that are generally high quality.
Due to the weakening economy, the red-hot job market appears to be at an end. Employers are already handing out pink slips, giving rise to complaints about the “injustices” of the market system, particularly among younger workers whose careers have been furthered by an unusually long economic boom.
A proper education reform would involve at least three steps. First, end all involvement in the issue by the federal government. Second, at the state level, end compulsory attendance laws that strike at the heart of individual and family freedom. Third, privatize the system so that users pay the going market price and nonusers are let off the hook.
Some ninety percent of all antitrust lawsuits are litigated by the private antitrust bar, which is to say, they involve one company suing one of its rivals, as opposed to the government bringing the suit. As a rule, whenever one company sues a rival it is because the rival is charging lower prices or providing superior products and services. Antitrust lawsuits are meant to throw a monkey wrench into the smoothly-functioning gears of the competitive process, and are therefore inherently anticompetitive.
One of the modern hero-myths the State has cultivated about itself is that government vaccination programs drastically reduced some common communicable diseases in the twentieth century. For decades, the government has required certain vaccinations for entry into schools, and most parents have passively submitted to the inoculation of their children. Now, in response to increasing evidence that vaccines may not be the boon to our health that has been supposed, opposition to mandatory vaccination programs is building.
