As Steve Forbes stresses, the role of currencies is to serve as a standard of value, representing a measuring stick of the worth of goods and services. “Floating the currency is like floating the clock. Let’s say you floated the
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Some implicitly accept the behavioral dream of “Skinner box” economics of stimulus and response, in which lower rates impart a stimulus of reward for more work and risk-taking, yielding more revenues for the government. A successful economy, however, is driven
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The key issue in economics is not aligning incentives with some putative [supposed] public good but aligning knowledge with power. Business investments bring both a financial and epistemic [knowledge] yield. Capitalism catalytically joins the two. Capitalist economies grow because they
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George Gilder writes Unleash the Mind in The National Review. It is from his soon to be released update of his classic Wealth and Poverty. All progress comes from the creative minority. Under capitalism, wealth is less a stock of
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The problem of the United States comes not chiefly from its liabilities, serious though they are, but from the suffocating webs of government regulations and subsidies, pettifoggery (a quarrel about petty points) and litigation that is devaluing the the assets
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George Gilder writes Unleash the Mind in National Review. It is from his soon to be released update of his classic Wealth and Poverty. It is not the enlargement of incentives and rewards that generates growth and progress, profits and capital gains
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The war against the rich thus continues in the world’s wealthiest country. It is a campaign now led and inspired by the declining rich, to arouse the currently poor against the insurgently successful business classes. By their communicative skills and
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Economists ill-serve themselves by describing economics as being about the allocation of scarce resources. It is about the creation of resources. Capitalism is more an information system than a incentive system. The key issue in economics is aligning knowledge with
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Socialism is an insurance policy bought by all the members of a national economy to shield them from risk. But the result is to shield them from knowledge of the real dangers and opportunities ubiquitous in any society. Rather than
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The United States must overcome the materialist fallacy: the illusion that resources and capital are essentially things, which can run out, rather than products of human will and imagination, which in freedom are inexhaustible. This fallacy is one of the
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Natural history is a saga not of balance but of convulsive changes, wiping out whole species left and right, transforming continents, evulsing mountains, and flooding vast plains and valleys. There is no such thing as equilibrium, in ecology any more
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In economics, when demands is permitted to displace supply in the order of priorities, the result is a sluggish and uncreative economy, inflation, and a decline in productivity. Such disorders afflict both our politics and our economics today. The problem
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One of the little probed mysteries of social history is society’s hostility to its greatest benefactors, the producers of wealth. On every continent and in every epoch the people who have excelled in creating wealth have been the victims of
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A useful definition of inflation is the disassociation of demand from supply- the rise of the belief that one’s buying power can long exceed one’s supplying power, that one can get something for nothing, that one can continually take from
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The chief effect of steeply progressive tax rates is to lower the price of luxury and leisure in relation to investment and work. Paul Craig Roberts elucidated the point: Take the case of a person facing the 70 percent tax
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The result of all this activity by both the public and private sectors – shifting, diffusing, equalizing, concealing, shuffling, smoothing, evading, relegating, and collectivizing the real risks and costs of economic change- is to desensitize the economy. It no longer
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The greatest damage inflicted by state systems of redistribution is not the “distortion of markets,” the “misallocation of resources,” or the “discoordination” of producers and consumers, but the deflation of capitalist energy, the repression of entrepreneurial ideas, and the stultification
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The early years of the twenty-first century saw what might be termed a hypertrophy of finance and an atrophy of enterprise. Why did 30 percent of the economy’s profits during the mid-2000s come not from the positive-sum benisons of productive
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“He will not go far who knows from the first where he is going.” So spoke Napoleon as he launched his brilliant, tempestuous, and catastrophic career from Versaille via Moscow to St. Helena’s isle. A heroic spectacle for a man,
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The problem with the financial products division [of AIG] was not that the regulators were absent or inadequately empowered. The problem was that the regulators, like most regulators, lacked relevant information. They were experts on the politics of the situation,
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