That’s right; the belief is that when the government takes a dollar out of your pocket, puts that dollar through the political process, and decides where to spend it (based on input from special interest groups), the economy will somehow return more money in growth than the money invested, even after Washington bureaucrats take their cut. It’s magic!
Cato’s Letters remind us how far we have moved from what George Washington described as “the sacred fire of liberty … staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people,” making their insights worth reconsideration. The upcoming November elections coincide with the letters’ 300th anniversary.
The good news is that the bad news during the previous precedent – the Spanish Flu – was followed by the Roaring Twenties. So far, the 2020s has started with the pandemic, but there are plenty of years left for the prosperous 1920s to become a precedent for the current decade. If so, the driver of the coming boom will be technology-enhanced productivity, as it was during the 1920s.
Tamny understands economics with an intuitive and uncanny contrarian eye. He points out: “If the virus had been lethal, the lockdowns would have made even less sense…The biggest enemy of life is poverty. Let’s never again fight disease with the taking of freedom and wealth so essential to knowledge, prosperity, and by extension life itself.”
According to the pro-lockdown narrative, the United States is experiencing a second COVID wave because it took a lackadaisical approach to locking down. We allegedly closed too late and reopened too early, leading to a failure to tame the virus in the spring. Simply put, this claim is entirely without merit.
Traditional American civic postulates support individual freedom and the limits of governments, as well as universal principles of human rights. If liberty means anything, it means that we are not locked down. It means, moreover, that lockdowns are unconscionable.
How many people take the garbage the Times puts out at face value, and never look at the data for themselves? We have to stop allowing ourselves and our kids and communities to be dumbed down by the media, the government education system, and those with a special interest in fundamentally remaking the world into some dystopian Marxist “utopia.”
One of the basic building blocks of economics is that both parties benefit from voluntary exchanges ex ante, or else they would not be willing to engage in it. The fact that consumers use Big Tech to the extent they do is overwhelming evidence of their value.
Certain aspects of the employment relationship were guaranteed by government enforcement — including overtime, unemployment insurance, paid time off, opportunity for union representation, and other requirements. This required a corporate form of business.
There’s a famous story of a Canadian inventor who developed an inexplicably fuel-efficient carburetor. Men from the oil industry reached out to him. The inventor soon disappeared and he and his carburetor were ultimately never seen or heard from again. The story is of course patently bogus. Countless variations of it have been told since […]
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