Nearly everyone complains about capitalism’s defects, or market failures. In fact, those are social failures, not specifically market failures, which show up when many rational individual actions create a social situation that displeases everyone. This means that government dirigisme — state direction or displacement of the market — cannot be a remedy because who do you think staffs the government and how do they get there? A big difference between the two systems — market and state — is that while the market diminishes social defects, the government magnifies them.
Low Interest Rates Don’t Have the Stimulus the Economy Craves
In the 2006 Mike Judge movie Idiocracy, the dumbed-down human population five-hundred years into the future have replaced water in drinking fountains with the salty sports drink “Brawndo,” and have even begun to water farm crops with Brawndo. Facing a nationwide...