Charity serves an important and indispensable function in society: not everyone can engage in enough productive work to meet the daily needs of his or her family. But entrepreneurs and businesses have to create wealth before it can be given away.
What if machines took most of our jobs? Things would become less expensive, and humans would become wealthier in real terms, just as has happened since the Industrial Revolution began. Fear of labor-saving technology continues unabated, nonetheless.
Governments don’t like it when citizens emigrate to escape high taxes and other government-imposed costs. Governments would much rather keep productive citizens and their money at home. Bigger countries find it’s much easier to keep us in.
Governments worldwide are turning to "financial repression" to manipulate the economy through easy money and aggressive regulation. In the end, we'll find it will amount to little more than slapping a band-aid on a serious problem.
Many still maintain that the developing world is being exploited by free markets, and that the humane solution is more foreign aid. In fact, free markets are nowhere to be found in the developing world, and we find much poverty as a result.
The European Central Bank is continuing with its negative interest rate policy, but it's not having the desired effect. Instead, the central bank is just filling the void by buying up government debt with newly created money.
The video game industry has been criticized for taking advantage of tax breaks, with critics claiming that the industry is being "subsidized" by a smaller tax bill. But, there's a very big difference between a tax break and a subsidy.
Economic populists have become skilled at causing economic calamities while escaping the blame. Instead, it’s the non-populists that end up picking up the pieces while getting the blame for the unemployment and wealth destruction that follows in the wake of populist economic policies.
Former Mises Institute Fellow Jingjing Wang discusses how she discovered Austrian economics in China, and her plans for the future as an Austrian economist.
