[This article is excerpted from The Austrian School of Economics: A History of Its Ideas, Ambassadors, and Institutions (2011). An MP3 audio file of this article, narrated by Paul Strikwerda, is available for download.]
At the same time the vested interests try to ratchet up and expand IP,1 anti-IP awareness is spreading.
The last few years as an executive in a manufacturing company gave me a frighteningly close look at the inner workings of regulators in our government. Maybe I’m just naïve, but what I discovered was shocking.
The meltdown of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 didn’t begin the crisis; it was a model of how all troubled firms should have been handled. Had this policy been followed from the beginning, I have little doubt that the downturn would already be over and we would not have added to the debt problem.
I recently watched the first episode of 30 Days, Morgan Spurlock’s series about changing a person’s lifestyle for 30 days in order to widen their perspective on the world. In this episode, Spurlock and his fiancée spent 30 days trying to survive on minimum-wage salaries — and they make blatant errors in judgment when it comes to their personal finance decisions (spending $80 when his nephew and niece came to visit for a day, for example).
[Economic Freedom and Interventionism (1980)]
Animals are driven by instinctive urges. They yield to the impulse that prevails at the moment and peremptorily asks for satisfaction. They are the puppets of their appetites.
