Is it really such a stretch to suppose that when the US government (and Federal Reserve) brings the economy closer to outright socialism — as with Hoover, FDR, Bush, Obama, and Bernanke — that those very interventions hamper the economy?
It was the physiocrats who broke with centuries of sound economic reasoning and contributed to what would become, in the hands of Smith and Ricardo
Without a dynamic price mechanism — trademark of a money-based, capitalist society — there can be no calculation, and without calculation there can be no advanced division of labor. Our society would be no more advanced than it was during the age of barter.
Past expenses incurred during the production of a good are completely irrelevant to the determination of the current price of a good. The market price of a good is determined solely by the relative valuations of goods and money by the buyers and sellers of the good.
Healthcare in Canada is not free. Constantly full waiting rooms and long waits for procedures are not an unavoidable fact of life but a product of a "priceless" supply system, where waiting for service acts as a rationing substitute for the market price.
Thomas Mun set forth what would become the standard mercantilist line.
The question of the relation of cost to value is properly only a concrete form of a much more general question — the question of the regular relations between the values of such goods as in causal interdependence contribute to one and the same utility for our well-being.
Alleged deficiencies could be removed by a reform of the laws concerning liability for damages inflicted and by rescinding the institutional barriers preventing the full operation of private ownership.
We are certainly as far from capitalism in its pure form as we are from any system of central planning. The world of today is just interventionist chaos.
