Pillars reviewed
Ron Paul’s Pillars of Prosperity is reviewed here.
The Broken Window Fallacy Reapplied
It is not a good thing to destroy wealth. Bastiat puts it this way: “Society loses the value of things which are uselessly destroyed.” It sounds like an unexceptional claim. But herein rests the core case against everything the government does. Perhaps, then, we can see why the allegory is not better known. If we took it seriously, we would dismantle the whole apparatus of American economic intervention. If you are with me to this point, perhaps you have a hard time believing that anyone really believes that wealth destruction is actually a good thing.
Last Knight Live Blog 24 - Kraus
It is said that no other book on economics has done more to advance sound economics than Human Action: A Treatise on Economics. The book is a product of many years of scholarship and reflection on purely abstract aspects of science of economics and most pressing problems confronting practical economic affairs. It offers a grand system of thought; it integrates a great many ideas and major doctrines ranging from epistemology to business cycle theory into one unified whole to comprehend the forces that shape the contours of economic life in a modern division of labor society.
The Broken Window Fallacy Reapplied
It is not a good thing to destroy wealth. Bastiat puts it this way: “Society loses the value of things which are uselessly destroyed.”
It sounds like an unexceptional claim. But herein rests the core case against everything the government does. Perhaps, then, we can see why the allegory is not better known. If we took it seriously, we would dismantle the whole apparatus of American economic intervention.
If you are with me to this point, perhaps you have a hard time believing that anyone really believes that wealth destruction is actually a good thing. Let me try to show that the fallacy is as pervasive as ever.
Why Is Bernanke Trying to Fight the Bear?
Last Tuesday, January 22, 2008, the US central bank lowered its federal funds rate target by a hefty 0.75% to 3.5%. The panicky decision to lower the fed funds rate target was made ahead of the Fed’s meeting at the end of this month. Last Tuesday’s cut by the Fed was the largest nonscheduled interest-rate cut in more than 20 years.
Where does most of that money go?
While the report cited is several months old, Declan McCullagh recently wrote about how nearly all government-to-government foreign aid to Africa ends up in Swiss bank accounts.
For instance, in 2004 $94 billion was desposited into the accounts, most originating from African politicos. The following year the amount increased to $150 billion.
Painted Into a Keynesian Corner
Here is my Townhall piece regarding the Fed’s predicament. An excerpt:
In a time of recession, when we need to tighten our belts, the politicians encourage us to go buy new cars and plasma screen TVs. The idea seems to be that if we all just ignore the recession, it will get bored and go away.
How Government Destroyed Serious Music
R.J. Stove, who just completed a one-volume survey of the history of classical music, offers some intriguing observations of how government destroyed serious music:
The Privatization of Public Services
Privatization is the only hope for renewal of once proud cities, writes John Chapman. In his 1944 book entitled Bureaucracy, Mises distinguished between “bureaucratic management” and “profit management.” He explained that neither incentives nor exploitation of useful information are optimal under bureaucratic management, and by definition there could be no rational calculation via profit and loss. Hence, coordination of resources will never be optimally efficient. That is to say, it is in the very nature of government management (bureaucracy) that it will be inefficient, and prone to corruption. Conversely, after privatization, operations and cost efficiencies improve because once incentives are in place and aligned, and people are empowered and incited (by the lure of profit) to utilize “particular knowledge” of markets, methods, competitive conditions, et al., performance improves.
Government Property Is Not Really “Public” Property
If you want to expose the absurdity of the state, think governmental accounting. Really, there is no better way to show the impossibility of a government solution to scarcity than by reading the annual audit of any governmental entity.
Goethe considered double-entry bookkeeping — the essence of accounting — to be “one of the finest inventions of the human mind.” For without accounting, we lose the ability to calculate, and without the ability to calculate, modern civilization is impossible.
