Global Economy

The twenty-first century belongs to China.

 The advantages of the corporate form — limited liability and raising capital — have been known for as long as mankind has had the technology to produce useful things whose production is too expensive for a single investor to handle.

The Fed's likely continuation of its inflation in an attempt to solve the problems created by its previous inflation and the consequence that this will drive down the value of the dollar on foreign exchange markets will provide momentum for the commodity-price boom for some time.

If we can avoid the protectionist trap and reconcile the budget, the falling value of the dollar will eventually attract investors and stimulate exports.

But if investment-conference attendance is any indication, the price of gold and other commodities has a long way to go — up.

You may say it another way: that the intentions of mass production cannot be realized unless management and labor are both free. So long as that freedom existed in the motorcar industry, the cost of an automobile went lower and lower until it became, pound for pound, the cheapest manufactured thing in the world, not the Ford car only but all cars; and automobile labor at the same time was the highest-paid labor of its kind in the world.

We do know, however, that free people are better able to adapt and prosper than unfree people, in whatever situation the future holds.

In their eagerness to keep the pot boiling somehow, somewhere, many financial pundits are spinning the line that Emerging Markets now offer a form

In a longer talk, I could discuss the role of police and enforcement of judgments, but this much should give some flavor of the legal system practiced by the Somalis. It provides an effective rule of law entirely without the backing of a government.

What, then, can be done with economic theory whose models resemble jokes about how many elephants can be fit into a refrigerator? And how, given the overrepresentation of often indecipherable mathematical symbolism, is one to distinguish good economics from bad?