The world went bonkers for about ten years way back when. The stock market crashed in 1929, and with it fell the last remnants of the old liberal ideology that government should leave society and economy alone to flourish. After the Great Depression hit, there was a general air in the United States and Europe that freedom hadn’t worked well. What we needed were strong leaders to manage and plan economies and societies.
The tongue is a discerning instrument; in the hands of a traveled soda aficionado, it is capable of leading to insightful truths about politics. To the drinker who has imbibed foreign sodas, this truth stems from the peculiar, yet incontrovertible fact that American soda is not so hot.
The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised—a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o’erleaps its improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide.
A persistent virus is beginning to spread, threatening to sweep the country as the next great epidemic. What is the ill? The Fourier Complex of course. The Fourier Complex? Yes, it is the mental state—syndrome—identified by its vile symptoms: extreme envy, fear of the free market, belief in redistribution, and the desire to legislate deprivation in order to harm those better off.
Margaret Atwood’s poem “Siren Song” begins:
This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible: the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see the beached skulls.
From time to time over the last 30 years, after I have talked or written about some new restriction on human liberty in the economic field, some new attack on private enterprise, I have been asked in person or received a letter asking, “What can I do”—to fight the inflationist or socialist trend? Other writers or lecturers, I find, are often asked the same question.
Years of spending, inflating, taxing, and redistributing has left the US economy teetering on a recession that our best and brightest—meaning the ones who created this mess—claim requires a multibillion-dollar economic-relief package to quell fears, promote confidence, and spur recovery.
And, one might add, to keep things calm past election time, which is the real purpose of this bipartisan effort to “stimulate” the economy out of recession fears.
We all want to live well and no one wants their living standard to decline. No one likes recession. It’s just the way we are made. This is one reason that the official environmentalist movement has an uphill battle. The poverty that comes with living without industrial civilization lacks public support—once people clue in that this is what they are after.
A central occupation of economists is to analyze the nature, causes, and effects of incentives—the circumstances that are held to motivate human action. Economists agree on the positive role that “good” incentives play to increase production. They also agree that “perverse” incentives have an opposite impact. One of these perverse incentives is called moral hazard.
Punditry is seriously exercised about the worldwide shortage of food, which is real enough, but not an act of nature or a result of market failure. Rather, it stems from the combined failures of government, and with results that are potentially catastrophic.
