Treating the causes of higher prices and higher interest rates in low-income neighborhoods as being personal greed or exploitation, and trying to remedy it by imposing price controls and interest rate ceilings only ensures that even less will be supplied to people living in low-income neighborhoods thereafter.
The Population Bomb is a textbook example of a scare book.
Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, ‘social justice’.
The hallmark of the vision of the anointed is that what the anointed consider lacking for the kind of social progress they envision is will and power, not knowledge. But to those with the tragic vision, what is dangerous are will and power without knowledge – and for many expansive purposes, knowledge is inherently insufficient.
If we go back to the beginning of the twentieth century, before government intervention became pervasive in housing markets, we find people paying a smaller percentage of their expenditures for housing than at the end of that century.
Back then, the rule of thumb was that housing costs – whether rents or mortgage payments – should not take more than one-fourth of a person’s income. In 1901, housing costs took 23 percent of the average American family’s spending. By 2003, it took 33 percent of a far larger amount of spending.
As late as 1912, Britain carried more than half the goods shipped across the seas of the.
No small part of the existing problems of the public schools is that the school day is already so long and boring, with so little to challenge the ablest students. Moreover, many average and below-average students who have lost all interest are retained by compulsory attendance laws for years past the point where their presence is accomplishing anything other than providing jobs for educators.
At the heart of the industrialization process was iron and steel, and Britain was pre-eminent in their production.
The ignorance, prejudices, and groupthink of an educated elite are still ignorance, prejudice, and groupthink – and for those with one percent of the knowledge in a society to be guiding or controlling those with the other 99 percent is as perilous as it is absurd.
The time is long overdue to count the costs of runaway rhetoric and heedless accusations – especially since most of the costs, including the high social cost of a breakdown of law and order, are paid by vulnerable people for whose benefit such rhetoric and such accusations are ostensibly being made.
Even Karl Marx, who spent more than three decades living in Victorian England, acknowledged the rise in British workers’ living standards between the 1840s and the 1860s.
A fool can put on his coat better than a wise man can put it on for him.
What is called “social” planning are in fact government orders over-riding the plans and mutual accommodations of millions of people subject to those orders.
Even when the British took part in these wars, they fought on other people’s territory or at sea.
People who depict markets as cold, impersonal institutions, and their own notions as humane and compassionate, have it directly backwards. It is when people make their own economic decisions, taking into account costs that matter to themselves, and known only to themselves, that this knowledge becomes part of the trade-odds they choose, whether as consumers or producers.
Conservatism, in its original sense, has no specific ideological content at all, since everything depends on what one is trying to conserve. In the last days of the Soviet Union, for example, those who were trying to preserve the existing Communist regime were rightly referred to as “conservatives,” though what they were trying to conserve had nothing in common with what was advocated by Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek or William F. Buckley.
All that is necessary is for the conqueror to establish a degree of law and order under which others can feel secure.
Never underestimate the difficulty of changing false beliefs by facts. Henry Rosovsky.
Only after that political support is strong enough to cause fallacious ideas to become government policies and programs are the missing or ignored factors likely to lead to “unintended consequences,” a phrase often heard in the wake of economic or social policy disasters.