With gasoline prices rising to their highest levels in years, and then dipping again after Labor Day, it was inevitable that the politicians would come out of the woodwork and demand yet another costly investigation of the U.S. oil industry. The reason is not scheming industry executives or incompetent managers. Politicians and the bureaucrats they empower, on the other hand, have caused major disruptions to oil supplies. Let us count the ways.
There is almost complete unanimity among economists that the most important role of the central bank is to attain price level stability. It is held that price stability promotes economic growth and people's well being by increasing the efficiency of the market mechanism. In fact, Austrians are correct to see that such a policy redistributes resources and generates instability.
Drug reimportation is not a panacea, nor is it likely to have any long-term effect upon the rising costs of prescription drugs. It is at best a temporary fix for those most in need of lower priced drugs. What will have a lasting impact, however, is the extent to which the entirety of the Washington conservative and libertarian alliance was willing to bypass the larger issue of free trade.
Entrepreneurs are widely considered to be important parts of economic activity. Why would they not be studied carefully by those who are supposed to know so much about this activity? Yet actual policies in actual economies affecting actual human beings have been crafted by economists who have, for the most part, largely ignored entrepreneurial activity.
While the Federal Reserve-induced stock market bubble has been flattened, despite continuous inflating by Greenspan's troops, the land price bubble continues to expand in Las Vegas.
A few years ago, Paul Cwik came across an e-mail that was impossibly dumb. It called for a "Gas-Out." The idea was to boycott gasoline for a few days. This action would drive the price of gas down, and at the same time, it would show "Big Oil" that if they tried to raise prices again, we'd hurt them. The email is circulating again.
Artists often see themselves as underappreciated members of an elite that knows which cultural achievements are economically valuable and which are not. In actuality, profit drives businessmen to attempt a vastly more complex task: the estimation of actual consumer wants in a vastly complex and changing world.
Oil prices have reached a 29-month high, reflecting a variety of factors including the prospects for war. At the same time, the Producer Price Index recorded a 1.6 percent jump in January, the biggest across-the-board increase since January 1990. Just as the script dictates, writes Lew Rockwell, cries of "gouging" are now heard across the land.
In 1902, writes George Leef, those who aspired to enter the legal profession could take several different routes. One was simply to study law individually. A second route was to apprentice yourself into a law firm and learn what you needed to know in that environment--as Clarence Darrow did. The third option was to go to law school.
Why are Maine farmers dumping milk? The way to respond to falling prices, writes Robbie Blevins, is to offer a better product more efficiently. The signal of the need to do so is a feature of free enterprise, the system in which the consumer—which is to say, the common person—is king.
