Interventionism

Recorded from The Mises Circle in Phoenix, Arizona, April 10th, 2010. Sponsored by James M. Rodney.

Recorded at The Mises Circle in Phoenix, Arizona, on April 10th, 2010. Sponsored by James M. Rodney.

"Twenty-five percent of college-bound high-school students cannot name the ocean separating the United States from Asia. This happens despite the fact that education funding in the United States tripled from 1960 to 2000."

"The pensions/social security system is an intergenerational Ponzi scheme, the biggest scam ever invented."

In the end, this is the reason why progressivism as a system of economic thought is every bit as bankrupt as Social Security.

It is just a bit strange that companies would be, on the one hand, attacked for not providing enough in wages and, on the other, required to not provide any wages.

With medical costs continuing to rise, mostly due to countless previous interventions in the healthcare economy, the unemployed and downsized workers thought that at the very least their Uncle Santa should take care of their medical needs.

Wherever the doctor is being paid by the authorities and not by the patients, the outcome of compulsion is a set of fees that does not cover the investment in expensive instruments. This has an additional effect that could scarcely have been unintended: It forces the patient into governmentally controlled dispensaries which can afford the investment — at the taxpayer's expense.

But if the government itself prints additional dollars, then it is legal and it increases the quantity of money. And this is the monetary problem. Apart from the fact that this brings about a very bad situation for those people who were not receivers of the new additional money, because they have not received more money, they now face higher prices.

"There is no point in making plans unless causal determinism is true; yet, if causal determinism is true, the very basis of central planning is destroyed, because the government planner is himself determined. By a strange lapse of logic, the believer in causal determinism always excludes himself from the system which he is putting into effect."