Category Archives: Political Economy

Centrally Planned Scarcity

Barack Obama, Business, Capitalism, Economy, Free Markets, Political Economy, Regulation

In a free market, consumers direct supply and demand. And in a free market, increased demand leads to increased supply, as producers compete with one another to meet the demand.

We are being told that there is a “shortage of crucial medicines including cancer drugs,” and that “President Barack Obama on Monday signed an executive order aimed at remedying the shortage.”

Remedying? Really? At least one of Mr. Obama’s regulatory sleights of hand will increase the scarcity it seeks to remedy: hounding drug sellers for “charging exorbitant prices for scarce medicines.” High prices for scarce goods are what help to harmonize supply and demand.

Alas, “You can’t fix stupid”. The reported shortages in 178 drug—most involving older, generic, cancer drugs administered by injection, as well as antibiotics to treat infections and nutritional drugs for patients who can’t eat—would have been rectified in an unimpeded market:

The shortfall of supply has obviously followed a sudden urgent demand for these drug. Large demand and short supply would initially send the prices of these drugs rocketing. Profits in an unhampered pharmaceutical market would signal to the many drug makers that it’s time to enter into production.

Mr. Obama, however, has taken further action to shortcircuit the street signs of the market—profits.

When there is a shortage of a good in a highly regulated market such as ours, it is safe to say that it is a result of government incursion into the economy. Somethings gets between the market and the consumer—in the case of these drugs, the culprits are Food and Drug Administration regulations and the patent system, which gives a drug company a lengthy monopoly over manufacturing.

Dealing in Death

Foreign Policy, Iran, Just War, Middle East, Military, Morality, Political Economy, Propaganda, Terrorism, War

The US is better off in the imperial sense, says Lew Rockwell to Russia Today about the US government’s latest adventure in Libya. Americans using depreciated US dollars are not better off, but the “merchants of death” are doing swell—the Pentagon, the CIA, weapons suppliers, oil companies; every enterprise that is in cahoots with the government is living it up.

“We The People” suffer the impoverishment that comes with the Zimbabwefication of the coin associated with deficit spending (bailouts and war) in perpetuity. (To wit, the money supply has appreciated by 30 percent and QE3 is in the offing.)

Lew spells out the wealth-destroying nature of the obscene orgy enjoyed by our overlords in DC and their patrons and hangers-on.

‘The Program’ Behind The Occupy Wall Street Protests

Business, Capitalism, Democracy, Economy, Individual Rights, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Private Property

Tired of listening to mealymouthed left-libertarians laboring to find commonalities with the Occupy Wall Street “sleepover”? You should be. I know I am. I have no sisterly solidarity for socialists.

Here’s the stark reality of this extravaganza: Within the buildings are people beavering away, working for a living. Railing against them without—sitting idle in the parks, streets and on sidewalks—are individuals who trash, scream, sleep for hours on end, loiter, strip down and publicly body-paint each other, copulate and defecate.

Economist George Reisman dissects the farrago of economic errors the protesters and their sympathizers commit: “What the protesters do not realize is that the wealth of the one percent provides the standard of living of the ninety-nine percent.”

Read “How a Highly Productive and Provident One Percent Provides the Standard of Living of a Largely Ignorant and Ungrateful Ninety-Nine Percent” by George Reisman.

UPDATED: Can the Incredible Hulk Strike at Socialism? (Clutching @ Straws)

Barack Obama, Business, Capitalism, Economy, Elections, Free Markets, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Socialism

The excerpt is from “Can the Incredible Hulk Strike at Socialism?”, now on WND.COM:

“New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie may be planning to join the Republican presidential thrust and ‘Perry.’ … references to Ronald Reagan do not make a speech Reaganesque. To be Reaganesque, Christie will have to expose the spirit of socialism—envy, entitlement, aggression—and juxtapose it with the morality of capitalism: commerce, creativity, comity.

Gov. Christie boasted that his ‘Executive Branch’ showed the requisite leadership, not least in educating the public before enacting solutions to New Jersey’s problems.

If Christie wishes to ‘educate’ the rest of the country, as he claims to have done for New Jersey, he would have to first strike at the assorted zero-sum, socialist notions, whereby one person’s plenty is portrayed as another’s poverty. Chief among these is the concept of ‘the American economic pie.’ This pie-in-the-sky is perverse in the extreme because it feeds the idea of a preexisting income pie from which the greedy appropriate an unfair share.

Wealth, earned or ‘unearned,’ as egalitarians term inheritance, doesn’t exist outside the individuals who create it. Wealth is a return for desirable services, skills and resources rendered to others. Labor productivity is the main determinant of wages—and wealth. Most wealthy Americans produce what they consume—and much more; they don’t remove or steal it from poorer Americans.”

Read the complete column, “Can the Incredible Hulk Strike at Socialism?” on WND.COM.

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UPDATE (Oct. 1): Clutching At Straws. Rasmussen Reports: Obama 44%, Christie 43%:

Few expect him to run, but New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is essentially even with President Barack Obama in an early look at a hypothetical Election 2012 matchup. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely U.S. Voters shows that Obama earns 44% support in the matchup, while Christie attracts 43%. Six percent (6%) prefer a third option, and eight percent (8%) are undecided.