Part One
Part Two
Audio: “Let’s Pass a Law!”
Text:
What has made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven. – Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (quoted in Hayek 2007, p.76)
Legislation is the great panacea of our times. Whenever most people encounter a difficult social problem, their first inclination these days is to become active in politics, start a campaign, and try to get a law passed to fix it. Like all great claims to cure everything in one fell swoop, the cure is often worse than the disease. In times past it involved religious appeals to a god or a demigod in the form of an earthly king. While the residues of such superstitious cults still persist today, they have all been superseded by the cults of State and democracy. Instead of appealing to the will of a god, although that still does happen, politicians today appeal to the will of the people. Like appeals to gods, of course, rival politicians make contradictory claims saying “the people want this!” or “no the people actually want that!” and, of course, the people can only “express their will” through the campaign speeches of a grandstanding politician.
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Common sense economic lessons for the interested layman. How a free market economy works, from an Austrian School perspective.
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Lesson Three: Direct Exchange.
An overview of the possibilities of interpersonal interaction with a specific focus on mutual exchange of goods between individuals. An elaboration of price theory – what are prices, how are they determined, supply & demand analysis, and more analytical tools. A discussion of markets, their allocative efficiency, the benefits of free trade, and how markets are self-correcting. All of this done abstracting away from money and complexities in order to comprehend the nature of exchange and the market – skills to be applied to all future lessons and analyses.
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