"Fast moving bad news builds prosperity"
Glenn Reynolds:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently tweeted: "The free-market system lets you notice the flaws and hides its benefits. All other systems hide the flaws and show the benefits.”
This drew a response: "The most valuable property of the price mechanism is as a reliable mechanism for delivering bad news." These two statements explain a lot about why socialist systems fail pretty much everywhere but get pretty good press, while capitalism has delivered a truly astounding results but is constantly besieged by detractors...
Last paragraph.
Markets make people better off, but they don’t provide sufficient opportunities for politicians to extract bribes and intellectuals to feel better about themselves. This explains why they’re unpopular with politicians and intellectuals. The real question is why anyone else listens to the self-interested claims of politicians and intellectuals. Maybe because the subject of what works and what doesn't in economics is mostly written by journalists?
10 comments:
Lem: Great post!
Leftists need to explain to everyone why and if Hillary's international pay-to-play quid-pro-quo schemes are corrupt or not. Hillary hid those schemes and used her powerful position as Sec of State on our dime to stuff her Family's foundation with huge sums of money. Hillary is also a socialist & a crony capitalist - the worst of the 2 combined. Leftists need to explain to us how her lawless behavior is acceptable.
btw - socialism is government.
Capitalism is not a system of government - it is a system of non-coercive commerce.
It doesn't mean that capitalism cannot be abused - but certainly socialism, a system of government, like Hillary encapsulated, is nothing BUT abuse.
Yes, great insight!
Free market concepts have a quality that is hard to get for a lot of people. They often seem counterintuitive or like some kind of magic, because they require a certain amount of faith. You let things happen rather than try and force them to happen.
Free markets need people who are experienced in it. We have been controlled and over-regulated for so long that we can't remember how to participate without controlling each other's options. We don't want to win, or compete, and we definitely don't want anyone else to win. We just want our participation trophies and a vacation.
What an odd perception, pitting the two as information systems.
I have a buck and I need milk.
You have milk and you need a buck.
We do a transaction. Capitalism.
Think about how much regulation and legislation is involved in that milk deal. Reams of it.
& after all that government intervention, the milk is more expensive, a politician got rich and is on the golf course, and the cow is still miserable...
I'm still baffled by Venezuela.
If you think about it, it would seem that the economies of scale plus the benefit of scientific management would lead to increased crops on large collective farms rather than on small family owned plots of land managed by greedy, ignorant peasants.
What's the point of being in power or taking power over others? So that you can milk them. That's the point. That was feudalism. That is socialism, which is feudalism returned in modern dress. That's 98% of human history. Capitalism offers no such payoff to the rulers. No free ticket. For anyone. Everybody's gotta WORK! Screw that.
Post a Comment