All was not well with the well that was all
the way down at the foot of the hill;
For into the drink had fallen a drunk
who kept drinking to get his full fill.
Strange this might sound, though not to the stranger,
who resounded with joy at his plight:
Still in the dry hole did hide a whole still
filled with hooch, to his hapless delight.
Sophie B. was an interesting girl...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
She was a rebellious socialite out on the run...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
A general fall in prices can also emerge as a result of a fall in the money stock. An important cause for such a fall is a decline in fractional-reserve lending. The existence of a central bank and of fractional-reserve banking permits commercial banks to generate credit not backed up by real savings, i.e., credit created out of thin air. Once the unbacked credit is generated, it creates activities that the free market would never support — activities that consume, and do not produce, real wealth. As long as the pool of real savings is expanding and banks are eager to expand credit, various false activities continue to prosper.
Whenever the extensive creation of credit out of thin air lifts the pace of real-wealth consumption above the pace of real-wealth production, this undermines the pool of real saving. Consequently, the performance of various activities starts to deteriorate, and bank's bad loans start to rise. In response to this, banks curtail their loans by not renewing maturing loans and this in turn sets in motion a decline in the money stock.
Although Kaitlyn and her mother left the multiplex together...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
My main message is that most of our economic problems derive from previous government intervention in the economy. In its attempts to "help" us, the government has managed and regulated the economy, and passed laws that sounded constructive but that in fact hurt the economy and us.
Political economic reality is replete with the law of unintended consequences. Our economic problems are the natural result of political forces, not the natural result of (supposedly evil) market forces. We have voted our current problems into existence by electing politicians who promised to help us by means of economic intervention and regulation.
It may sound shocking to some, but modern-day America compares "favorably" to fascist Germany of the 1930s with regard to the degree to which the state interferes with and controls economic activity. First of all, government expenditures at all levels of government account for about 40 percent of national income. ... This doesn't count all of the off-budget government agencies that exist at the federal, state, and local levels of government as James Bennett and I documented in our book, Underground Government: The Off-Budget Public Sector. If this is included, government expenditures as a percentage of national income would be at least 45 percent, which is not so far from the 53 percent in Nazi Germany that Hayek alluded to.
He [Mises] focuses primarily on the necessity of large-scale social cooperation. This social cooperation, by which complex chains of production function to improve the general standard of living, can be brought about only by an economic system based on private property. Private property in the means of production, coupled with the progressive extension of the division of labor, has helped to free mankind from the horrific afflictions that once confronted the human race: disease, grinding poverty, appalling rates of infant mortality, general squalor and filth, and radical economic insecurity, with people often living one bad harvest away from starvation. Until the market economy illustrated the wealth-creating possibilities of the division of labor, it was taken for granted that these grotesque features of man's condition were the fixed dictates of a cold and merciless nature, and thus unlikely to be substantially alleviated, much less conquered entirely, by human effort.
... Here, we must point to a vital distinction that lies at the heart of economic science: between "scarcity" and a "shortage." Not only are all forms of energy scarce, but all goods and services, without exception, are scarce as well. That is, people could always use more of them if available. We have always lived in a world of scarcity for all goods, and we always will, short of the Garden of Eden; economic development over the centuries has consisted in making goods relatively less scarce than heretofore. The test of whether or not any good or service is scarce is very simple: is its price greater than zero? If it is, then it is scarce. Happily, air is not scarce, and so its price on the market is zero (although this is not true of conditioned air.)
... What the State, what every would-be tyrant wants, of course, is war. War, especially a war that the State is in no danger of losing, provides the perfect milieu for all power to redound to the State, for siphoning wealth from private into governmental hands, for 'making the bastards obey'. War, as Randolph Bourne so perceptively pointed out a half-century ago, "is the health of the State."
For, generally, in their private lives, people wish only to go about their business in freedom, to be left alone with the money they have earned to run their lives as they see fit. Throughout history, governments and their rulers have sought to pull the wool over the eyes of their subjects, to make them like, or at least be resigned to, the oppression and exploitation they suffer at the hands of the State.
The boom is called good business, prosperity, and upswing. Its unavoidable aftermath, the readjustment of conditions to the real data of the market, is called crisis, slump, bad business, depression. People rebel against the insight that the disturbing element is to be seen in the malinvestment and the overconsumption of the boom period and that such an artificially induced boom is doomed. ...
...[W]e must call the boom retrogression and the depression progress.
Big Tuck tapped the breast of his body armor and said...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
Consumers might not realize that stealing cars...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
Wealth is a meaningless term without the concept of value. If we know that the purpose of human action is to satisfy one's needs and wants, then the material wealth of two different individuals (let alone abstract entities such as nations) cannot tell us much about the satisfaction of their needs and wants. Wants and needs are subjective, unknown, and immeasurable by an outside observer.
We live in antiliberal times, when individual choice is highly suspect. The driving legislative ethos is toward making all actions required or forbidden, with less and less room for human volition. Simply put, we no longer trust the idea of freedom. We can't even imagine how it would work. What a distance we have traveled from the Age of Reason to our own times.
When do we say, "you're welcome"? We say that when we give a gift (a good or service) to a person without receiving anything in return. For example, I might hold a door for a person. That person says, "thank you," and I say, "you're welcome." Another time might be at a birthday party when the recipient of a gift expresses thanks.
These are one-way examples of benefaction. We are giving but not necessarily getting anything tangible in return. What makes the case of the commercial exchange different? Why do both parties say, "thank you"? It's because each side gives a gift to the other.
There is something to Trotsky's vision of man under communism. From all historical appearances, man under a totalitarian state functions differently than a man under liberty. And degrees of man exist as society slowly turns from liberty to slavery.
...
One year, at the beginning of spring, a duck built a nest in the moat, under one of the many bushes. As her ducklings hatched and grew, it came time for them to search for water. However, despite their repeated attempts, the ducklings could not jump from the moat to the walkway bridge.
A drop in the gross market rate of interest affects the entrepreneur's calculation concerning the chances of the profitability of projects considered. Along with the prices of the material factors of production, wage rates, and the anticipated future prices of the products, interest rates are items that enter into the planning businessman's calculation.
The result of this calculation shows the businessman whether or not a definite project will pay.
Dear Mr. Scribbler,
Please forgive my intrusion...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
The Shocking Truth Behind Strange Incidents in Space!...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
What Holt wanted, in a nutshell, was freedom for those being pushed around — freedom from interference by others. But, he wrote in Freedom & Beyond, "few of us really believe in freedom. As a slogan, it is fine. But we don't understand it as a process or mechanism with which or within which people can work and live. We have had in our own lives so little experience of freedom, except in the most trivial situations, that we can hardly imagine how it might work, how we might use it, or how it could possibly be of any use to us when any serious work was to be done."
“This seat taken?” said the beautiful redhead...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
I'm on a Sunday walk and a nice boy tries to sell me lemonade. A budding entrepreneur! Still, I decline. So he strengthens his pitch: "I'm donating the profits to stop child abuse."
...
This proves that the traditional rap on capitalism is false. It is not only about private gain for the few. Business can be as enlightened as the individuals running them. Note that all this praiseworthy other-directedness is being accomplished within the matrix of exchange, which has wrongly been maligned as selfish. As we can see, there is no contradiction between doing good and doing well. All these innovations that merge the third sector of charity with the first sector of profiteering illustrate that capitalism can adapt itself to an age of broad-minded social concern.
“Nothing can be done and you are a moron for trying” is a snotty-yet-unshakable Foundation Stone of the Mogambo Grandiose Economic Theory (MGET), which, as a corollary, also says that you should always bet against the government using a fiat currency over the long term because that particular bet has always paid off, paying out unbelievable odds, which means you should be buying gold, silver and oil with Both Freaking Hands (BFH).
Maybe it was a myth, born of a universal but desperate hope...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
The principle that ours is a consolidated government of all the people of the United States, and not a confederation of sovereign States, must necessarily render it little less than omnipotent. That principle, carried out to its legitimate results, will assuredly render the federal government the strongest in the world. The powers of such a government are supposed to reside in a majority of the people; and, as its responsibility is only to the people, that majority may make it whatever they please.
...
But in a country so extensive as the United States, with great differences of character, interests and pursuits, and with these differences, too, marked by geographical lines, a fair opportunity is afforded for the exercise of an oppressive tyranny, by the majority over the minority.
The Rothbardian perspective is distinctive because he refuses to interpret the actions of states as belonging to a special class of human action. Rothbard holds all people to the same standard of conduct, whereas others give the actions of states special moral considerations. For instance, if one person who is not designated as possessing state authority threatens another person with violence in order to take their property it is considered criminal. However, the very same action if committed by those with state authority is not considered criminal. Nobody can deny that the actions are the same, even if the intentions are different. The difference in these actions is simply a matter of how the actions are interpreted.
Man, on the other hand, does not now possess a like set of instinctual do-nots: built-in prohibitions. Instead, he must enjoy or suffer the consequences of his own free will, his own power to choose between what's right and what's wrong. In a word, man is more or less at the mercy of his own imperfect understanding and conscious decisions.
I had been relying on a very tired twenty-year-old sedan...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
Because governments are not living persons who care and can be motivated to do the right thing. They are collections of individuals — politicians and bureaucrats, not exactly the most desirable types — who pursue their own interests. Regardless of the rhetoric, their interests coincide with the public good only on occasion, like a broken clock being right twice a day. Even in the most enlightened times — even in the best of times — governments have huge incentives to spend more than they take in. These are not the best of times; the population has been trained for generations to expect subsidies and freebies as their due, without regard to who pays or how they will be paid.
If one contemplates the situation, it will be seen that the slave relationship is wholly improper for it presumes to transfer the control of one living man into the hands of a second living man. The condition is contrary to nature and can only be maintained if both play their specific assigned roles. The slave must act as though he did not control himself, as though, indeed, the slave-master did control him. The slave-master must act as though he really could and did control the slave. But the slave always controls himself, even though he may do so in harmony with his owner's wishes.
Beyond the question of “how” the spending could be achieved, is the deeper question of “why” such activity should be sought at all. Excessive spending, fueled by an insane housing bubble and catalyzed by reckless monetary and fiscal policy, was the reason that our current recession became unavoidable. Why would we want to go down that road again?
I was recently rummaging among some recordings...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
Price movements are neither good nor bad; it depends on the cause of them. In a properly functioning economy, prices go up and down. Rising prices suggest scarcity, signaling to consumers that they should switch to substitutes. And they tell producers to get on the ball and stock the shelves with new supply. Falling prices send the opposite message…trimming profit margins and telling producers to cut back.
Here at The Daily Reckoning, when we go into a liquor store and find lower prices, we are delighted. We stock up. But we are clearly out of step with mainstream economists.
Have you wondered why the costs of running for public office have soared? That’s obvious too – because the stakes are higher. As the federal budget grows so does the pork that each member of congress can pull out of the barrel.
The number of congressmen is more or less constant (though it grows with population…after a 10-year lag for the census). But the amount of money given out increases…making each congressional seat more lucrative. You can do the math yourself, but the point is – crime pays. At least, for a while…
The trouble with crime is that it only makes the criminals rich. Everyone else gets poorer.
“Good – a-choo – morning, Father, thank you for seeing me...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
The First World War and American intervention therein marked an ominous turning point in the history of the United States and of the world. Those who can remember "the good old days" before 1914 inevitably look back to those times with a very definite and justifiable feeling of nostalgia. There was no income tax before 1913, and that levied in the early days after the amendment was adopted was little more than nominal. All kinds of taxes were relatively low. We had only a token national debt of around a billion dollars, which could have been paid off in a year without causing even a ripple in national finance. ...
It was remarkable how such a forbidding edifice...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
Despite the lofty pretensions of most governments, the fact remains that they, like any other group of men, are nothing more than a collection of individuals. The "rights of a government," like the rights of any other association of men, can be morally no different than the rights of the men who comprise it. All that which is immoral for men acting individually is equally immoral for men acting in association. There is nothing a government can morally do, which individuals by themselves cannot morally do. The group is ethically no different from the individual.
Betty Boop, virginal vixen of the silver screen...
...West End Blues."
...music video
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
When we reduce the abstraction "political power" to its operational reality, to the way it actually works, we see how it feeds on reform. Every proposal to improve man's lot by political measures calls for the enactment of a law or an official edict. The law presupposes that some people are not doing what they ought to do or are doing something that ought not to be done. Hence, the purpose of the law is to regulate human behavior. The very premise of the law is that violation or evasion will ensue from its enactment, that it will not be self-enforcing; therefore, the heart of the law is a punishment clause. No law is worth the paper it is printed on without such a clause, and no law has any effect unless it is implemented with a corps of enforcers. Therein lies the secret of the accumulation and perpetuation of political power.
Yesterday, we went on at some length as to why government jobs weren’t the same as private sector jobs. Since they’re never put to the test of the market, you never know whether they are worth having, let alone saving. Do they add to the sum of human wealth and happiness…or do they subtract from it? No one knows for sure.
But here’s the strange and remarkable thing; modern economists actually would prefer jobs that are NOT worth doing.
WKCR-FM just aired its forty-third annual Roy Eldridge Birthday Broadcast...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
The central libertarian principle is the principle of nonaggression. Taken to its logical conclusions it pretty much covers everything that is the cause of so much consternation in the life of our society. You would think that no one could possibly have a problem with this principle, but many people do. In order for the nonaggression principle to mean anything you have to believe you own yourself and, by extension, that you own the fruits of your endeavors. For any statist/collectivist self-ownership is conditional. In other words, you only own yourself to the extent society says you own yourself which is really the same as saying you don’t own yourself at all. You can make the decisions about your life that society/the state says you can make. Ultimately and inescapably, in the statist’s view, society/the state owns everything and anything you own, including yourself — you only own conditionally.
It is a fable that governments interfered with banking in order to restrict the issue of fiduciary media and to prevent credit expansion. The idea that guided governments was, on the contrary, the lust for inflation and credit expansion. They privileged banks because they wanted to widen the limits drawn to credit expansion by conditions prevailing on the unhampered market or because they were eager to open to the treasury a source of revenue.
Mendacious Smith has an endearing smile...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
Mendacious Smith (men·dā’·shǝs smith) n., Slang. – a politician; esp. a pejorative for an official of the national government: That Mendacious Smith was on the boob tube last night claiming that violating my liberties was for my ‘own good’. [poss. cynical deriv. from film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington]
Since Society puts so high a value on independence from a foreign State, it should not demur at the cost of maintaining this independence. One must pay for what one wants. However, when we examine the most approved method of financing war we find that it is based on a general reluctance to foot the bill. Every war is fought with current production — there is no way of shooting off guns that have not yet been made or of feeding soldiers with food that will be raised by the next generation — and in a real sense every war is conducted on a pay-as-you-fight basis.
The economic consequence of the most approved method of financing wars is that a lien on the future production of the nation is established, and nearly always it is a permanent lien. ...
The U.S. Treasury issued a series of quarter-dollar coins...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
Tocqueville described the situation [of France in 1848]: "The truth — the deplorable truth — is that a taste for holding office and a desire to live on the public money is not with us a disease restricted to either party, but the great, chronic ailment of the whole nation; the result of the democratic constitution of our society and of the excessive centralization of our Government; the secret malady which undermined all former governments, and which will undermine all governments to come."
Once upon a time, there was a wonderer...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
Charles Dickens evidently intended to make...
[Sorry, the review period has ended.]
