It used to be that every economist worth his salt knew Gresham’s Law (or, if he was Polish, Copernicus’s Law): “bad money drives out good.” Narrowly understood, this rule says that when the government requires people to accept different forms of money at an exchange rate fixed by law, the form of money that is overvalued (the “bad money”) will circulate, while the form of money that is undervalued (the “good money”) won’t.
[From The Writings of F.A. Harper, Volume 2]
A certain Talmudical philosopher once offered us this apothegm:
The noblest charity is to prevent a man from accepting charity, and the best alms are to show and enable a man to dispense with alms.1
I posted the following comment to Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing post Competition and Google Book Search:
[This article is excerpted from chapter one of The Rise and Fall of Society.]
Throughout history, until about the middle of the 18th century, mass poverty was nearly everywhere the normal condition of man. Then capital accumulation and a series of major inventions ushered in the Industrial Revolution. In spite of occasional setbacks, economic progress became accelerative. Today, in the United States, in Canada, in nearly all of Europe, in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, mass poverty has been practically eliminated. It has either been conquered or is in process of being conquered by a progressive capitalism.
