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! #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! #36 - Mises

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Ludwig von Mises for “The Market Economy as Affected by the Recurrence of the Trade Cycle” :

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.

KA-POW! #32 - Fedako

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to Jim Fedako for “The New Bureaucratic Man” :

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.

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. ...

KA-POW! #3 - Harper

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to F.A. 'Baldy' Harper for “The Omelet Has No Rights" :

The omelet, or collectivist, concept holds that the social omelet is the sole concern and objective of humanity. "When you are making an omelet, you must break the eggs." By this view, human rights are vested completely in the collective of persons, not in individuals. Since the will of the collective is deemed to be the same thing as justice, it follows that rights reside in the omelet and not in the individual eggs. So it becomes humane and socially justifiable to break the eggs for the omelet because that is what eggs are for. ...

KA-POW! #2 - Mallick

This week's “Kick-Ass Post O’th’ Week” (KA-POW) goes to a student named Abhinandan Mallick for “How I Found the Austrian School" :

In Human Action, Mises identifies a methodological dichotomy between the social and the natural sciences. This dichotomy is in how we use teleology and causality to explain different kinds of events.

These two terms are best explained by use of examples. When we throw a ball, for instance, we do not reason that it is guided in a teleological way by some mystical spirit or "prime mover." Instead we use the laws of mechanics and causality to examine the position, velocity, and forces acting on the ball, in order to predict the future position and velocity of the ball.