AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS ADDICT

Intellectuals and Society (Photo credit: arellis49)

Read Thomas Sowell’s “Random Thoughts” column.

Here are a couple of samples.

“I can’t get excited by the question of whether Senator Robert Menendez had sex with a prostitute in Central America. It is her word against his–and when it comes to a prostitute’s word against a politician’s word, that is too close to call”.

“One of the talking points in favor of confirming Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense is that he was a wounded combat veteran. How does that qualify anyone to run the whole military establishment? Benedict Arnold was a wounded combat veteran!”

Now read two articles by Thomas Sowell titled “Prophets And Losses, and “Prophets And Losses II”. Dr. Sowell talks about what we have been discussing in the last few articles, namely the Federal Reserve and the impossibility of having enough knowledge to accomplish what they have set out to do. Here are a couple of quotes from the articles.

“Today, the economy has not yet fully recovered from the recession that the Federal Reserve System’s staff and chairmen thought we would avoid.”

“We all make mistakes. But we don’t all have the enormous and growing power of the Federal Reserve System — or the seemingly boundless confidence that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke still shows as he intervenes in the economy on a massive scale.”

“In a worldwide context, during the 20th century economic central planning by governments — prophecy at the grandest level — led to so many bad consequences, in countries around the world, that even most socialist and communist governments abandoned central planning by the end of that century.”

“The failures of governmental prophecies in so many different contexts cannot be blamed on stupidity. Most of the people who made these prophecies were far more educated than the average person, had far more information at their fingertips and probably had higher IQs as well.”

“Their intellectual superiority to others may well have given them the confidence to venture into areas where no human being has what it takes to make prophecies that lead to policies overriding the plans and actions of millions of other human beings”

This entry was posted on February 13, 2013 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Econ. 101, Government and Politics. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Ben Bernanke, Benedict Arnold, Chuck Hagel, Federal Reserve System, Thomas Sowell