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! #39 - Woods

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Thomas E. Woods, Jr. for “Mises's Vision of the Free Society” :

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.

KA-POW! #38 - Rothbard

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

... 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.)

KA-POW! #34 - Rockwell

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. for “Freedom of Association” :

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.

KA-POW! #33 - Tucker

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Jeffrey A. Tucker for “A Society of Mutual Benefactors” :

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.

KA-POW! #31 - Mises

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Ludwig von Mises for “Role of Interest in Entrepreneurial Calculations” :

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.

KA-POW! #30 - Riggenbach

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Jeff Riggenbach for “John Holt: Libertarian Outsider” :

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."

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! #28 - Mogambo

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to The Mogambo Guru for “No Cure for Government Spending” :

“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).

KA-POW! #27 - Upshur

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Abel P. Upshur for “Our Federal Government” :

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.

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! #20 - Bonner

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Bill Bonner for “The Expanding Industry of US Government” :

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.

KA-POW! #18 - Wollstein

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Jarret B. Wollstein for “The Nature and Morality of Government” :

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.

KA-POW! #17 - Chodorov

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Frank Chodorov for “The Profit of Reform” :

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.

KA-POW! #16 - Bonner

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Bill Bonner for “Government Spending Economic Theory” :

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.

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.

KA-POW! #14 - Mises

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Ludwig von Mises for “Free Banking and Contract Law” :

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.

KA-POW! #12 - Smith

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to George F. Smith for “The Long Shadow of Frédéric Bastiat” :

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."

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! #10 - Douglass

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to student Brian Douglass for “On the Road to the Servile State” :

Belloc defines the Servile State as "that arrangement of society in which so considerable a number of the families and individuals are constrained by positive law to labor for the advantage of other families and individuals as to stamp the whole community with the mark of such labor." ...

The Servile State is not the market economy. It is also not simply socialism. Instead, it is a creation of the State to benefit a class, which is considered free, and for which class the system is perpetuated by force of law. Essentially, it is a State marked by artificial, government-created monopolies. ...