Clearly marked prices on private-sector cash-payment surgeries are a great thing. In fact, the competition of for-profit surgery centers drives down prices at more "traditional" (i.e., highly bureaucratized) hospitals.
Singapore left both the British Empire and Malaysia before finally becoming an independent city. It then proceeded to become one of history's most impressive economic success stories.
Only Spooner realized that it would be compounding crime and error to try to use government to right the wrongs committed by another government.
With this analysis of gift giving, we're reminded that mainstream economists seem hell-bent on reforming anything they haven't already screwed up.
Why does this domino process affect only banks, and not real estate, publishing, oil, or any other industry that may get into trouble?
Trade agreements have thus become obsolete tokens of negotiation in larger geopolitical disputes, protectionist tools for managing and interfering with global trade flows.
This immense cooperative system is known as a free-market economy. It was not consciously planned by anybody. It evolved.
The boom produces impoverishment. But still more disastrous are its moral ravages. It makes people despondent and dispirited. The more optimistic they were under the illusory prosperity of the boom, the greater is their despair and their feeling of frustration.
The fully satisfied individual is purposeless, he does not act, he has no incentive to think, he spends his days in leisurely enjoyment of life. It is certain that living men can never attain such a state of perfection and equilibrium.
Many advocates claim government intervention is necessary because markets are too unstable. The real instability, however, comes from the immense uncertainty over what government will do next with its vast and arbitrary power.
