Sound economic reasoning highlights a major difference between social sciences and the natural sciences. We cannot rely on observation and measurement to gain understanding of social phenomena.
Virtue-signaling politicians in New Jersey have banned single-use plastic bags, claiming to "help the environment." They need to read Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson instead.
Economics is based on human action as purposeful behavior. This means when people act, they try to achieve something. It does not mean that they are always accurate or do the “right thing."
The Fed's suppression of interest rates in the USA didn't just affect this nation's economy. It also drove investors to seek higher interest rates in questionable investments.
Monarchs created Europe's modern states but lost the ability to control them. Then, having grown beyond the tools that helped monarchs turn themselves into absolute rulers, "the state acquired a life of its own."
