Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Actually, contrary to what the graphic below says,

I'm not deeply concerned about anybody else's possessions. When they taught me the Ten Commandments in Sunday School, they told us that the Tenth was the key to obeying most of the rest. "Thou shalt not covet." I focussed my attention on that principle and succeeded in eliminating concern about my neighbor's stuff. I most certainly do not look at somebody's stuff and wonder whether they deserve it or not. It's none of my business

I do judge people, based on their desire and ability to help or harm me and/or my loved ones, yet I question the nature of those helps and harms. In particular, I question whether this or that free-market reform has truly harmed anyone. I notice that the people making those claims (I have a few in mind, though they shall remain nameless) are actually doing quite well now, whether they see it or not. One of them had to change the way he invested his money, another had to look for a new career and a third had to get off welfare. Actually, all of them changed because the reforms required self-respecting, honest people to make such moves. The reforms made it too obvious that they were leeching off either the taxpayers or the previous, unsustainable, corporatist arrangements of the New Deal and the Fair Deal.

Well, all right, their discernment was not so clear. It's true that they were inconvenienced, but the other option was to tax the hell out of the ones with jobs to pay for the then current welfare-state, which included heavy doses of corporate welfare. More than they were already taxed.

The Mises Daily Article today has an article slamming Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol for founding Neo-Conservatism (note that Buckley's not Jewish), but it has these two paragraphs that need to be disseminated widely:

Economics tells us how enterprise creates seeming miracles all around us. But it also tells us that real resources don’t grow on trees, that all government spending must take a bite out of the private sector in some way. Economics tells us that all attempts to control prices and wages will lead to shortages and surpluses, and that any intervention causes trouble. It tells us that you can't expand the money supply without creating distortions—among a thousand other points that contradict government wishes.

From the political point of view, economics seems like a series of strictures against doing things that politicians naturally want to do and intellectuals want to tell them to do. So it is no wonder that intellectuals and politicians resent market logic. And yet, economic logic is not a fiction.


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