[Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World • By Tyler Cowen • Dutton, 2009 • viii + 259 pages]
Tyler Cowen has written an unusual book. From the title, one expects a book that addresses the current economic crisis and prescribes a remedy for it. Instead, Cowen concentrates on the traits and virtues of autistic people. If Cowen wants to write on this topic, why does he lead the reader to think he will discuss something else?
Marketers love to entice potential consumers to try their product by adding an endless string of qualifiers. We have all heard commercials wherein the widget is claimed to be the “number one all metal, blue colored, American made, union produced, hand crafted, widget sold in the greater Anytown, USA area!”
It looks like this marketing strategy is going to be used against them. If you define the market narrowly enough, you are bound to find a “monopoly.” That is just what the Obama Justice Department is planning to do to the genetically modified seed market.
Paul Starr, a senior adviser to the Clinton health care reform effort, wrote:
In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal “cradle-to-grave” healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine. The “right to health” became a “constitutional right” of Soviet citizens.
The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would “reduce costs” and eliminate the “waste” that stemmed from “unnecessary duplication and parallelism” — i.e., competition.
Someone asked me the proper way to view deposit contracts, in the context of a discussion about fractional-reserve banking (FRB). He noted that in my A Libertarian Theory of Contract I state that contractual obligations can either be “to do” or “to give”; and that “to do” contracts are generally not enforceable due to specific performance, but can only result in damages if non performance actually occurs. This implies that the only real enforceable obligations are “to give” something.
“Last year, according to the IMF, the U.S. pumped an extra 1.1% of GDP into the economy. Germany did next to nothing.” WSJ
“The latest figures showed German exports had grown at their fastest pace for nearly three years at 7%, with particularly strong growth in demand from rapidly-growing economies such as China.” BBC
