Great writing, as usual. At least one thing leaped off the page when I read it, economies are so large they cannot be controlled by people (or words to that effect). I saw a segment yesterday where Michael Horowitz stayed the Payroll Protection Plan May be the largest fraudulent government program ever. Based on the small segment of data he has reviewed so far they are projecting tens of billions of dollars, maybe 100s of billions, in fraudulent claims. Many claims were filed with fictitious SSNs. Hasn’t the IRS/Treasury ever heard of the XLOOKUP function? Oh wait, that’s software, another reason why we shouldn’t allow government to manipulate the economy.
"The people who support big government and government intervention in the economy would have you believe that the economy is simply too complex to understand and that is why we must seek to control it. " Have you ever read the paper about the economics of a pencil? No one person knows how to make a pencil. The amount of human capital and specialization involved in the manufacture of the rubber, the wood, the lead, and the nickel, alone is too much for any one person to 'know'. And it is not necessary to for one person to 'know' all of it. One person specializes in producing the rubber, one to produce the wood, etc. When these materials are put together by the pencil manufacturer (eg. Faber-Castell); he is merely the last assembler in a long line of assemblers, to create the pencil. So yes, the economics of just a pencil are too complex for understanding. It is precisely because of this complexity that specializing and trading are necessary for the production of pencils. This cannot be planned. More importantly, the prices of each raw material cannot be set by an uninformed government organizer to correctly reflect the Supply and Demand for the pencil market, much less for the other 5 billion goods and services in an economy. Planned markets do not work. They never have. See the mountains of rusted steel beams in the middle of the USSR for proof of this well-known adage.
😂😂😂 Thanks for the links!
This should be retitled, “How to Make Economics Interesting in One Essay” perhaps?
Great writing, as usual. At least one thing leaped off the page when I read it, economies are so large they cannot be controlled by people (or words to that effect). I saw a segment yesterday where Michael Horowitz stayed the Payroll Protection Plan May be the largest fraudulent government program ever. Based on the small segment of data he has reviewed so far they are projecting tens of billions of dollars, maybe 100s of billions, in fraudulent claims. Many claims were filed with fictitious SSNs. Hasn’t the IRS/Treasury ever heard of the XLOOKUP function? Oh wait, that’s software, another reason why we shouldn’t allow government to manipulate the economy.
"The people who support big government and government intervention in the economy would have you believe that the economy is simply too complex to understand and that is why we must seek to control it. " Have you ever read the paper about the economics of a pencil? No one person knows how to make a pencil. The amount of human capital and specialization involved in the manufacture of the rubber, the wood, the lead, and the nickel, alone is too much for any one person to 'know'. And it is not necessary to for one person to 'know' all of it. One person specializes in producing the rubber, one to produce the wood, etc. When these materials are put together by the pencil manufacturer (eg. Faber-Castell); he is merely the last assembler in a long line of assemblers, to create the pencil. So yes, the economics of just a pencil are too complex for understanding. It is precisely because of this complexity that specializing and trading are necessary for the production of pencils. This cannot be planned. More importantly, the prices of each raw material cannot be set by an uninformed government organizer to correctly reflect the Supply and Demand for the pencil market, much less for the other 5 billion goods and services in an economy. Planned markets do not work. They never have. See the mountains of rusted steel beams in the middle of the USSR for proof of this well-known adage.
Thanks for the smiles! Also for the great post on economics!
Love it, thanks!