People who lack self-confidence aren’t likely to support efforts to achieve a free society, or even to understand why a free society is a desirable goal.
This alarmist headline (“Internet Use Affects Memory, Study Finds“) nicely plays into every technophobe’s worst fear: The internet is destroying our brains. But when you look at the details, it is absolutely rational. Two groups were told some stupid trivia and then one group was told that the information was saved and another group was told that it would be erased. Guess which group was more likely to remember the information?
Here we see the huge gulf between Austrian and Keynesian analysis.
Economics students all over the world learn Gresham’s Law in a severely distorted way. They are told that “bad money drives good money out of the market” as if that was a law of markets. It’s not. It’s a law (inevitable effect) of State intervention in the money market. Bad money drives good money out of the market only when the former is subject to a price control that sets its price higher than it would otherwise be with respect to the latter’s.
Repeal light-bulb central planning!
But check the end of the article. It reports on a poll that shows 84% satisfaction for the non-incandescent bulb. This is among the 0.5% of the population that knows what that is?
In any case, it is preposterous to judge the availability of a consumer good based on a poll. Folks, that’s what the market is for, and why markets should never be replaced by political management for any good or service.
The works of four of Mises’ favorite novelists are available in ePub and other formats on the wonderful resource eBooks@Adelaide.
Mises said of these authors, “How poor our lives would be if we had to miss the work of these giants…”
