KA-POW! #41 - Kelly

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Kel Kelly for “Give Capitalism a Chance” :

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.

KA-POW! #40 - DiLorenzo

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Thomas J. DiLorenzo for “Our Totalitarian Regulatory Bureaucracy” :

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.

KA-POW! #37 - Rothbard

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Murray N. Rothbard for “Carter's Energy Fascism” :

... 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.

KA-POW! #29 - Tucker

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Jeffrey A. Tucker for “Are We a Self-Hating Commercial Society?” :

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.

KA-POW! #21 - Bonner

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Bill Bonner for “A Propensity to Screw Up” :

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.

KA-POW! #15 - Carkuff

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Doug Carkuff for “Neither Left Nor Right: Of Liberty And Libertarians” :

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.

Scrooge Was Not ‘The Dickens’

Charles Dickens evidently intended to make...

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KA-POW! #11 - Lilburne

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to J. Grayson Lilburne, who quotes Ludwig von Mises in “For Civilization, It Is Mises or Bust” :

But once a society has plucked all the low-hanging fruit of "no-brainer" productivity improvements, what then can its members do to improve productivity? The only thing left to do would be to adopt improvements in productivity that involve more roundabout methods of production.

... However, since making bows and arrows takes more time [than making pointed sticks], and perhaps more resources, the hunters and their investment must be sustained by an adequate stock of food and other materials; even though the bows and arrows will yield a greater bounty, they will only do so after a longer period of time. Thus, savings are an indispensable prerequisite for increases in productivity that involve lengthening the structure of production.

KA-POW! #7 - Bonner

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Bill Bonner for “Merkel Joins the Fool’s Parade” :

One thing Americans take for granted is that they will always be the richest, most successful people on earth. They think that because that is what they have always known. The US economy became the biggest in the world before 1900. Americans had just what it took to become the richest people on the planet. They worked hard. They saved their money. They had little government interference. They had the industrial revolution at their backs…and nothing in their way. And they had a dollar that was ‘as good as gold.’ By the time the baby boomers were born the US had such a big lead over the rest of the world, it seemed like nothing could stop it. Free enterprise guaranteed new innovations and new wealth. Democracy guaranteed a political system that would adapt to the needs of the evolving economy.

Hypocritical Indignation

There has been much ink spilled condemning...

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KA-POW! #1 - Rothbard

My inaugural “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Murray Rothbard for “Capitalism versus Statism” :

If we are to keep the term "capitalism" at all, then, we must distinguish between "free-market capitalism" on the one hand, and "state capitalism" on the other. The two are as different as day and night in their nature and consequences. Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges in which producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others through prices voluntarily arrived at. State capitalism consists of one or more groups making use of the coercive apparatus of the government — the State — to accumulate capital for themselves by expropriating the production of others by force and violence.