Price fixing occurs when individuals from competing firms agree on what prices to charge for their products and services. Because private price fixing is illegal in the United States, these meetings are done in private and carry potential criminal penalties if the participants are apprehended. However, lest one think price fixing is a shady activity, consider that governments at all levels are the primary price fixers.
Since the government's rules for money creation are not working, it seems that the only plan of action that today's Keynesian economists should accept is for government to make counterfeiting legal. Lest anyone think this is silly, imagine the "stimulus" benefits that counterfeiting would produce.
Professor Fletcher’s book brings to mind a remark by Yvor Winters, in a review of C.S. Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Winters praised Lewis for his grasp of the facts,
Drug war-related injuries are bound to dominate the emergency room services of virtually all inner-city hospitals. And, although this incredible violence in America's inner cities is almost exclusively the result of the war on drugs, none of it should come as a surprise.
While the politicians and their media allies prattle on about "winners" and "losers" in the Microsoft antitrust case, they miss the larger story, one that has become a typical American tale: the ongoing assault of the Leviathan State upon the once free and productive business sector.
Either the U.S. should reclaim its traditional policy of free trade and peace and thereby end its international military interventions, or it should wage unrelenting war against any group or government that resents and predictably responds to U.S. policy.
Once again, we are back to trusting the government to protect us, even at a time when property owners are begging for the right to provide their own protection.
It is no surprise that in our current crisis we see economic fallacies calling for "temporary" government interventions in the economy popping up like mushrooms after a rain.
In a market economy, marginally "superior" technology-where it can be objectively defined-doesn't necessarily end up dominating, and that's the way it should be.
Alan Bock's book, Waiting to Inhale, gives readers an inside look at the forces behind the movement to give medical patients access to the legal use of marijuana.
