While politicians and bureaucrats always claim to work in the "public interest," the rewards they gain for making bad economic decisions are more important to them than any satisfaction they get from supposedly "serving the people."
For more than a century, elite progressives have imposed draconian measures to curb population growth, which they said would destroy the earth. The population has grown, but the earth seems to be doing quite well, thank you.
As artificially low interest rates damage the economy, progressives in Congress demand more of the same. In the vernacular, they want the economy to “take the hair of the dog that bit them.” Of course, this only makes things worse in the long run—which is where we are today.
California’s legislature wants to combine the idea of two-part price discrimination with a soak-the-rich mentality in charging for utilities. What possibly could go wrong?
“The public be damned” is a statement by railroad magnate William Henry Vanderbilt that has been twisted out of context. While the American ruling classes insist that private enterprise is the enemy of the people, it really is our government that bears that distinction.
When the government wants to make something more affordable, that usually means new subsidies, laws, and regulations that drive up the real price. Higher medical prices will mean more medical bankruptcies.
On this day ninety-one years ago President Franklin D. Roosevelt via executive order seized gold legally held by Americans, criminalizing the use of sound money. Our economy and our nation has never recovered from this act.
While government officially measures inflation using weighted averages incorporated into the Consumer Price Index, in truth it is impossible to establish an average price level. It really is the proverbial apples-to-oranges comparison.
Once again, Congress is threatening to ban TikTok over “national security concerns.” But as long as Washington continues its unnecessary and provocative posturing around China’s coasts, Americans will never be safe.
In his review of The Political Thought of David Hume: The Origins of Liberalism and the Modern Political Imagination, David Gordon examines systems of ethical norms. The Misesians have the best insights, of course.
