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Archive of posts published in the tag: Wealth and Poverty

A Historical Hostility to Wealth

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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Wealth and Money

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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Stimulating Conspicuous Consumption

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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Inputs and Outcomes

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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A Holocaust of Knowledge

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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An Atrophy of Enterprise

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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The Essential Task of Financial Markets

“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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Replacing Knowledge with Power

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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Rendering Scarcity Obsolete

Economists ill-serve themselves be describing economics as being about the allocation of scarce resources.  It is about the creation of resources.  Oil, for instance, is described as a natural resource.  It isn’t. In and of itself it is simply sticky

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An Organic Entity

George Gilder writes Unleash the Mind in National Review.  It is from his soon to be released update of his classic Wealth and Poverty. ( I have already preordered on Amazon.) Excerpt: America’s wealth is not an inventory of goods;

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