A new economic fallacy came of age in the course of the last prewar decade and threatens to play havoc with the future peace of the world. This fallacy consists in saying that a country’s national prosperity depends, essentially, upon a centralized planning of its economic life. Those who propound this point of view usually confuse full employment with prosperity and state the problem in terms of the former rather than of the latter objective.
I’ve posted before about Steve Wynn moving his headquarters to Macao. In this week’s Las Vegas Business Press David G. Schwartz, director at UNLV’s Center for Gaming Research, has an article pointing out the many ways Wynn has been a trendsetter for the gaming business.
“So is everyone feeling sorry for Exxon, as I do?”[Liberty magazine, July 1989]
This great piece in the WSJ reflects what Austrians have been saying for decades. There is no need for governments to break up natural monopolies, the market will take care of that when the consumers’ needs aren’t being fulfilled.
According to the article, cork producers had a huge monopoly and weren’t responsive to complaints about “corked wine.”
We love to detest pipe dreams, but what constitutes a pipe dream? Of the many we could record somewhere in our numbering should be the simple belief in ‘change via talking’. That is, placing all our trust into a strategy of pontificating.
Is it working?
Henry Hazlitt once reflected
The New York Times reports that many wealthy, high-earning Greeks are not reporting their income. It’s estimated that 20 to 30 percent of Greek GDP is underground, and “the government may be losing as much as $30 billion a year to tax evasion…” Like it was the government’s in the first place.
James Galbraith, economist and Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the University of Texas, says Germany has played “a game of extreme brinkmanship that pushed the euro zone to the edge of panic.”
But, please, don’t drink it in front of me.
A friend of mine in the liberty movement drinks raw milk. That’s not for me.
What really offends me is that adults — such as my friend — have to sneak around in order to buy something they believe is healthy.
[Excerpted from chapter 6 of Debt: Private and Public, Good and Bad, 1938]
