AUSTRIAN ECONOMICS ADDICT

When knowledge is allowed to flow unhampered through the market, mainly through the price system, it works to coordinate all activities as optimally as possible. But when Government interventions don’t allow this knowledge to flow freely, malinvestments and dislocations are the result. The only way to cure these problems is for the interventions to stop. This allows the market to purge itself of these wasteful activities via a recession. Unfortunately no politician, bureaucrat, or Fed policy maker wants to have this correction happen on his watch.

Even tough hampered markets have an appearance of sustainability, they ultimately succumb to economic forces.

Here are two articles that talk about hampered markets. The first article is titled, Mises Was Right: The Hampered Market Is Unsustainable, by Sandy Ikeda, at mises,ca. Here are some excerpts from the article:

“Regulatory Dynamics Are Worse Than Transfer Dynamics. This is all because of the central role that prices play in coordinating market processes. That means that the government’s attempt to execute macroeconomic policy by manipulating the quantity of money and credit is perhaps the worst aspect of regulatory capitalism. Monetary manipulation eventually impacts all market prices directly and severely. Other things equal, it is the most distortionary form of intervention.”

“We can rank the major categories of intervention in order of their distortionary effects and thus in order of their unsustainability: 1) Large-scale monetary manipulation, 2) Large-scale price control, 3) Large-scale income redistribution.”

“So, other things equal, a country that pursues a pure form of welfare state capitalism might last longer than a country that pursues a pure form of regulatory state capitalism……”

“……Every country that has attempted interventionism in the past 100 years or so has experienced repeated economic crises. In Russia, crisis led to the Bolshevik Revolution and later the collapse of the Soviet Union. In Germany, the failure of the Weimar Republic conditioned the rise of National Socialism and then later the “economic miracle” under Ludwig Erhard. And in the United States, regulation and monetary manipulation produced the Great Depression and, decades later, the so-called Great Recession of 2007–09, with the “Reagan Revolution” in between.”

Ludwig Erhard And The German Economic Miracle.

Here is the second article titled, We Live In A Time Of Piecemeal-Planning & Incremental Interventionism, by Richard Ebeling, at mises.ca. Here are some excerpts from the article:

“Wherever we turn we are confronted with politicians, political pundits, television talking heads, and editorial page commentators, all of whom offer an array of plans, programs, and projects that will solve the problems of the world – if only government is given the power and authority to remake society in the design proposed.”

“Even many of those who claim to be suspicious of “big government” and the Washington beltway powers-that-be, invariably offer their own versions of plans, programs, and projects they assert are compatible with or complementary to a free society.”

“The differences too often boil down simply to matters of how the proposer wants to use government to remake or modify people and society. The idea that people should or could be left alnoe to design, undertake and manage their own plans and interactions with others is sometimes given lip service, but never entirely advocated or proposed in practice.”

“In this sense, all those participating in contemporary politics are advocates of social engineering, that is, the modifying or remaking of part or all of society according to an imposed plan or set of plans.”

“The idea that such an approach to social matters is inconsistent with both individual liberty and any proper functioning of a free society is beyond the pale of political and policy discourse. We live in a time of piecemeal planning and incremental interventionism.”

“Society is a spontaneous order not a planned one.”

“Hayek argued that the true individualism starts from the premise that “society” is not some ethereal entity having an existence of its own, nor the designed creation of one or a handful of minds imposing a “plan” on people that produces the social order.”

“Instead, society is the cumulative and interactive outcome and result of multitudes of individual human beings making their separate individual plans that interact and generate connections and associations with other individual plans to produce the overall social order and its coordinated patterns.”

If you really want to do some home work, read The Use Of Knowledge In Society, by F. A. Hayek at mises.org.

Related Article – Spontaneous Order = Free Market Economy, at austrianaddict.com.

Related Article – Central Planners Hate Economics, at austrianaddict.com.

Related Article – Charles Hugh Smith; Why Suppressing Feedback Leads To Financial Crisis, at austrianaddict.com.