Market prices reveal critical information about sellers, buyers, and market demand. But government interference in markets substitutes a fake version of reality that leads to impoverishment.
Neither loose monetary policy, nor big-spending fiscal policy can grow an economy. All that these policies can do is to redistribute a given pool of real savings from wealth generators toward non-wealth generating activities.
The introduction of money does not alter the fact that individuals still have to produce something useful in order to secure some other useful goods for themselves.
Mexican politicians are claiming Mexican nationals are unsafe in the US. Meanwhile, Mexico's homicide rate - fueled by strict gun-control laws - has soared to five times that of the US.
Most Americans say crime has gotten worse over the past decade. They're wrong. Moreover, the focus on mass shootings appears misplaced when mass-shooting deaths make up less than one percent of all homicide deaths.
The modern norm is that economic growth causes measured income inequality to increase. But to have greater income equality and greater economic growth. It simply requires more free market policies and less government interventionism.
The brutal, absolutist, and mercantilist state that collapsed under the French Revolution was no benign and restrained regime. And in many ways, the monarchy's embrace of a powerful centralized state sowed the seeds of its own destruction.
The market probably interprets correctly that the European Central Bank will become even more dovish under Lagarde. This will encourage more risk in the financial system.
