If the government restricts supply and subsidizes demand, out-of-control prices, resource shortages, and unpleasant ad hoc coping restrictions will follow. That is the natural (economic) law. The government cannot repeal it. But it can stop its attempt to plan.
Economics
The Health-Care Nirvana Fallacy
Someone explain how coercive centralized bureaucratic control of medical decision-making and the purse can beat the decentralized free market with its undistorted price system. The government has many things besides medical care it wants to spend tax money on, and...
Time to Separate Medicine and State
The "progressive" coverage of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson's murder has an unspoken premise: namely, that we could have had a system in which medical care was instantly superabundant and free for everyone. There is no such system. We live in a world of...
Sayonara, Paul Krugman
After spending twenty-five years as a columnist for The New York Times, Paul Krugman is finally retiring from that position—twenty-five years too late, if one wishes to be honest. It is hard to measure the influence he had from that perch, but his columns surely were...
We Can’t Consume Our Way to Prosperity
Once upon a time, John Stuart Mill could write these words truthfully ("Of the Influence of Consumption on Production," 1844): It is no longer supposed that you benefit the producer by taking his money, provided you give it to him again in exchange for his goods. He...
Anyone Can Be a Capitalist, part 2
"It might be argued that only the 'rich' can afford to be capitalists, i.e., those who have a greater amount of money stock. This argument has superficial plausibility, since ... for any given individual and a given time-preference schedule, a greater money stock will...
Anyone Can Be a Capitalist, part 1
"[A]ny man can be a capitalist if only he wants to be. He can derive his funds solely from the fruits of previous capitalist investment or from past 'hoarded' cash balances or solely from his income as a laborer or a landowner. He can, of course, derive his funds from...
TGIF: Supply Precedes Demand
"Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production." —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776 "In the market economy the consumers are supreme. Their buying and their abstention from buying ultimately determine what the entrepreneurs produce and in what...
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