Free Markets

The world would be a happier place if official economic statistics had never been created. They are often inaccurate or otherwise flawed and misleading. An even more serious consideration: official statistics help to provide rationales for pernicious policy making.

It was while I was attending graduate school that I met Murray Rothbard. Rothbard followed LeFevre on the program and, although I do not recall the precise topic of his talk that day, I was extremely impressed with the joyfulness, affability, and sense of humor he projected. 

In the days of yore, to say that a man was discriminating was to pay him a compliment. It meant that he had taste: he could distinguish between the poor, the mediocre, the good, and the excellent.

If the cost of labor increases, someone has to pay for it. Laborers may pay in the form of decreased work opportunities, investors may pay in the form of decreased returns on capital, or consumers may pay in the form of higher prices required by increased costs.

Crystal meth is a horrible drug, but it is also a cheap date, the poor man's cocaine. During cocaine's heyday, meth was nearly extinct on the illegal market. Then came the war on cocaine.

Richard Henry Lee is best known for the June 7, 1776, motion calling for the colonies' independence from Great Britain, which led to the Declaration of Independence. As a consistent advocate of liberty, he also opposed the Constitution.
 

Joan Kennedy Taylor first became involved in the libertarian movement in the early 1960s, when she was a student at the Nathaniel Branden Institute in New York City. As a student of Objectivism, she espoused the political views of Ayn Rand.

It doesn’t seem to matter to Obama that the federal debt already has us $14 trillion in the hole — $140,000 per household. The answer from the Harvard masterminds is to unionize the contractors and subcontractors, to jack up the price of a mile of road to even more inflated levels.

I defy anyone to read these stories and still aver that our leaders are cold-hearted folk who relish nothing so much as the specter of people suffering from poverty, and, to boot, are in the pay of rich capitalist exploiters.

Most people are attracted to real estate because they perceive it to be a high-powered game. They envision building empires the way that most of us have done on the Monopoly board. People like real estate because it is a sexy investment.