printThe planned $25 billion to a favored and failing industry, GM, will cause other, perhaps successful, companies to fail. It’s what Frédéric Bastiat referred to as “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen“:
In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.
There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.
Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.
We are being sapped by bad economists and their political pimps.
Ludwig von Mises wrote this in Interventionism: An Economic Analysis:
“In the unhampered market, forces are at work which tend to put every means of production to the use in which it is most beneficial for the satisfaction of human wants. When the authority interferes with this process in order to bring about a different use of the productive factors it can only impair the supply, it cannot improve it.” (P. 17)
I think the argument for liberty is a little simpler than that. Quite simply, if you try to steal from me, or otherwise infringe upon my life, limb, and liberty, then I will fight back. As would any moral man.
I appreciate Mises’ efforts in his defense of liberty, but he didn’t have to make a big economic analysis of it. Indeed, for trying to find a social justification for a God-given right, he comes off as a socialist apologist of the libertarian creed. There’s no need to use a single mathematical formula, except for the following:
violating my property = paying the price [By your “logic,” there is no need to design skyscrapers, as huts serve man perfectly fine. That’s an apt analogy for your dismissal of Mises’ utilitarian writings.–IM]
Of course, there is a need to elaborate on why the DEFENDERS of property would be able to overpower the OFFENDERS of property in a moral world; and there is a need to elaborate on HOW a moral government should be run. But the mathematics that I have put forth in this comment are the essential argument for liberty.
Mises and Rothbard show that an immoral economic system is also an unstable one or if stable, then stagnant.
This is hard for me. Rationally, I’m in favor of free markets and opposed to unconstitutional bailouts. On the other hand, nobody’s paid any attention to the Constitution since 1933. Our federal government allowed foreign firms, whose governments effectively barred GM from their countries, to compete on an equal footing with GM in America. It’s hard to call that free trade. It’s also hard to imagine America with baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet. And no, I don’t work for GM.
Meant to say without baseball, etc. Ought to proofread my stuff before posting.
Gringo, I think it’s 1913 rather than 1933 (creation of the Federal Reserve.) Or one could go back further.
[Right you are, B.–IM]