In a rush to stimulate the economy, the Obama administration is touting various “visionary” plans to make the American economy more progressive, more innovative, and more forward-looking by subsidizing politically-motivated projects like “green” technology. These hands-on policies will be ineffective. Recent research suggests that a much more effective way to accomplish the same goals would be to eliminate intellectual monopoly and to reduce the regulatory burdens on innovators.
According to Paul Krugman, who wrote in The Return of Depression Economics that governments can solve almost any crisis simply by printing money, declares that California easily could solve its present crisis by raising taxes.
I was getting my haircut today, and the barber woman and I were talking about the sorry state of the economy. She said my that she is doing her part to help our economy by refusing to buy Mexican hair products, even though they are cheaper than American ones. She said she would spend as much as $2 more per bottle of shampoo if that’s what it would take, in the interest of boosting the American economy. Buying from Mexico can only hurt us.
[This article is excerpted from chapter 15 of Human Action.]
In nature there prevail irreconcilable conflicts of interests. The means of subsistence are scarce. Proliferation tends to outrun subsistence. Only the fittest plants and animals survive. The antagonism between an animal starving to death and another that snatches the food away from it is implacable.
As you may recall, I’m a libertarian and intensely interested in various normative theories regarding property rights, including justifications thereof, Lockean-type homesteading theories, and Austrian economics as related thereto. I have found your own formulations in this regard (e.g. in sec.
