World News

Ryan and Tho talk with Mises.org author and German native Rosanna Weber about the energy crisis in Germany. German policymakers have greatly worsened the ongoing energy crisis in Germany by abandoning nuclear energy and taking a hard line on Russian natural gas. Now with the damage done to the Nord Stream pipeline, German consumers face even fewer options as winter approaches. 

Rosanna Weber is a graduate student in Economic History at the London School of Economics and a freelance journalist.

Recommended Reading

“Germany’s Nuclear Choice: Russian Energy Crisis Forces a Reckoning” by Rosanna Weber: Mises.org/RR_101_A

“Eat or Heat: Europeans Already Are Facing Previously Unthinkable Dilemmas” by Claudio Grass: Mises.org/RR_101_B

“Europe Ditched Russian Energy. Now People Are Sitting in Line For Days to Buy Coal. Is Biden to Blame?” by Alice Salles: Mises.org/RR_101_C

“Germany’s (and Europe’s) Self-Inflicted Upcoming Energy Crunch” by Weimin Chen: Mises.org/RR_101_D

“The ‘Stunning Success’ of the Green Revolution Is Yet Another Progressive Myth” by Kristoffer Mousten Hansen: Mises.org/RR_101_E

Be sure to follow Radio Rothbard at Mises.org/RadioRothbard.

Today marks the birthday of Ludwig von Mises, and day 4 of our annual Fall Campaign.

Mises was the most important scholar of the twentieth century, a man who not only revolutionized our understanding of economic science, but was both the most powerful champion of liberty and property and the greatest enemy of socialists of all kinds.

In the streets of all our major cities, we are seeing what he feared: a generation of modern barbarians groomed by our universities to engage in socialist destruction. It is a direct failing of our schools, of our political thinkers, and of all Western institutions that have ignored Mises’s works.

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Many years ago, in his “Unscrambling Socialism” (Notes from FEE, November 1964), Leonard Read wrote:

Any adept student of human action knows that it isn’t enough merely to “drop anchor” in today’s sea of socialism, that is, to stop where we are. The U.S. is already playing host to more parasitic socialism than the economy can sustain … [and] there comes a point in time in growth when any parasite will destroy its host.

That statement seems far truer today than nearly any time in my memory, where what Albert Jay Nock once called octopean government has seemingly grown even more appendages and used them more aggressively against citizens. And calling socialism a parasite on the economy is insightful because it helps us see how socialism resists planned efforts to displace it:

Consider socialism’s double-barreled definition: the state ownership and control of the means and/or the results of production. Give it entry into any area and socialism insinuates itself into the warp and woof of the activity; it becomes embedded in the mores, the traditions, the way of life. Immediately there develops a stubborn vested interest to assure its continuance; it infects the economic, social, and political bloodstream.

Read then turned to the thorny question of how to successfully rid ourselves of this parasite, now even more important after several decades that have left us far more socialized than when he wrote:

How are we to break out of … any of the … many socializations? … thousands are asking how to engineer the dismantling of this labyrinthine growth, but not a one can blueprint the procedure; none ever will. Drafting a plan for riddance of socialism is like trying to find a formula for unscrambling an egg.

Read explained why a socialistic centralized plan will not work to defeat socialistic parasitism:

Escape is predicated on … dismiss[ing] the thought of engineering or planning socialism’s uprooting, and … an expanding appreciation of how a seeming chaos of initiatives and skills will miraculously combine, when free to do so, into ordered patterns of creative phenomena. In short, a growing comprehension of the miracle of the free market—a comprehension all too rare today.

Using the example of how someone trying to design how mail would be delivered in a free market, Read goes further:

Unable to think how he would deliver mail … unable to design or engineer the project in his own mind—that is, being unaware of how the market really works—he will likely draw the socialistic conclusion…. Mail delivery is a job for government.

[But] No one person can or ever will attain to such comprehension … free market mail delivery would be accomplished, not by any masterminding but in precisely the same manner as has voice delivery and all other creative phenomena: millions of tiny “think-of-thats,” in a chaos which defies cataloguing, ending up in … fantastic order.

It is this seemingly chaotic (in the sense of not being subject to anyone’s unilateral control) order that has advanced people’s well-being, rather than unilateral controls and those who impose them, which undermines it:

Natural and spontaneous configurations of creative ideas account for our economic and social blessings.

However, no one knows how to correct all the embedded socialist errors that have crept into almost every nook and cranny of society. In fact, it is harder than how to make a pencil, Read’s most famous illustration, because the protection of individual property rights mean that voluntary arrangements need only be worked out among those whose rights are involved in making a pencil, while every socialistic restriction hinders all efforts to instead produce nonparasitic results:

The point we must bear in mind is that socialism itself is but the political outcropping of a plurality of false ideas, notions, passions, plausibilities and emotions … all the way from doing good to feathering one’s own nest—all at the expense of others! To conclude that anyone can engineer or blueprint the eradication of these errors is no more valid than to believe that someone knows how to make a jet plane or to deliver mail. Plan an erasure of these myriad misconceptions from the minds of millions of unknown persons? … To fasten the eye on a design or an organized scheme or a blueprint to bring about socialism’s demise is to fritter away one’s time and energy.

Read suggests that rather than trying to plan the demise of socialism, we should instead focus our attention on building a good society:

A good society cannot emerge from the drafting board. Rather the good society is a dividend which automatically flows from antecedent virtues and talents…. And the shrinking or the withering away of socialism will come about, if at all, as a natural by-product of numerous antecedent actions that are meritorious in and of themselves.

Unsound ideas lead to socialism, just as sound ideas make for a good society.

Unsound ideas will produce their bad fruit until sound ideas prove acceptable. In short, its largely a matter of displacement or replacement. Any idea, right or wrong, will revert to an insignificant role if the value judgements of men do not approve it.

So how would a focus on a good society displace socialistic errors? Read continues:

Unsound ideas will lose authority whenever their intellectual source peters out, that is, whenever the intellectual source of sound ideas attains a dominant position … [so] socialism will shrink into historical oblivion whenever little or nothing is done to preserve it.

With the unsound ideas which underlie socialism: take no steps to preserve them but, instead, fasten attention on the sound ideas which give support to the free market and the good society. When we pursue high purposes, natural forces do their clean-up work for us as a dividend for having set our sights aright.

[Consequently, under this approach] We do not need to know how to mastermind or blueprint the unscrambling of socialism; we need to know little else than how to win Nature as an ally … with men of good faith, she will cooperate.

Leonard Read believed that a single plan for eliminating socialism everywhere was a pipe dream, because no one knows enough to make such a plan effective. In contrast, better ideas and better results from freely chosen, voluntary arrangements, when and where they are implemented, have the potential to unfasten parasitic government from draining our lives, liberties, and properties in those areas, and inspire other similar efforts. It is still a daunting task, but only principles of self-ownership and freedom, in the minds and hands of principled adherents, make it possible at all.

It may sound like a bad joke, but several central banks actually claim this. On the website of Sweden’s central bank, the Riksbank, you can read it both in English and Swedish. In English, the statement says: “The Riksbank is Sweden’s central bank. We ensure that money retains its value (over time).” The Swedish version translated to English says the same but with the words “over time” added.

England’s central bank, the Bank of England makes a similar statement on their website, saying: “We guard the value of your money by keeping prices stable.”

Then there is Bank of Canada: “We are Canada’s central bank. We work to preserve the value of money by keeping inflation low and stable.”

I sent an email to the Riksbank about this and asked them how they could possibly make such a statement, and how they define the term value. A week later I received an answer where they said that by “money retaining its value” they mean that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) should steadily increase in a “slow” pace (2 percent per year).

“Most other central banks, like the FED define price stability in this way,” they added. Sure, most central banks try to fool us into thinking that we need inflation to survive and that prices must rise to keep the economy going.

What Is Wrong with the Central Banks’ Statements

As you can see, they claim that as the CPI rises due to an increased money supply, money retains its value (price). But if CPI rises, then logically the value of the marginal unit of money falls. Price stability is defined by most central banks as an increase in CPI by approximately 2 percent per year.

However, prices for various goods and services do not increase evenly when the money supply is inflated. Orange prices may rise 1 percent, while house prices may rise 15 percent. Blind to the fact that the use of any good is subjective, it should be noted that most countries do not include houses in CPI since they view them as capital goods.

The fact that money is not neutral benefits the earlier recipients of new money at the expense of the later recipients. Newly injected money into the economy, hence, create larger price increases where they are first injected, known as the Cantillon effect.

Central banks also confuse value with price and the price of money with the price of CPI. Not surprisingly, central banks are created on faulty economic theory. It is common in everyday speech to refer to price as value, but they are two different things.

Price is a current exchange ratio between goods and/or services and money being traded. Carl Menger explained the concept of value brilliantly in his book Principles of Economics: “Value is a judgment economizing men make about the importance of the goods at their disposal for the maintenance of their lives and well-being. Hence value does not exist outside the consciousness of men.”

Conclusion

Kings and governments found out early that they could expand their power and increase their wealth by monopolizing the issuing of money. Thus, by making the rulers’ money the only legal tender, even fiat money was still valued by the majority, since alternatives were illegal.

After the gold standard was suspended, the governments normally kept the gold and let the paper money circulate without being redeemable. Since the unredeemable fiat money is still the only legal tender, not too many people think twice about it.

In a way, you can say that the central banks in collusion with the governments preserve the value of money. But the only way it preserves the value is by forcing people not to use any alternatives and thereby the great majority values government money, no matter what.

If people really were to think about it, would they value money that went up in price over time or money that went down in price? Consider the (approximate) prices of these commodities during the last one hundred years:

– The price (the purchase power) of the US dollar is down 94.34 percent

– The Swedish krona is down 96.61 percent

– The Canadian dollar is down 94.05 percent

– The British pound 97.08

Meanwhile the silver spot price is up 3033 percent and the gold spot price is up 8591 percent.

It should be noted that gold and silver prices rise due to monetary inflation, as does any other commodity. However, in terms of measuring CPI, the two metals serve as a “hedge against inflation.” The precious metals have been valued for thousands of years for its monetary advantages, beauty, and industrial purposes. Fiat money, on the other hand, is valued because it is the only legal option as money and because most people do not understand basic economics.

All that being said, a more appropriate statement by all central banks should read: “We are a central bank, and we ensure money is still valued by monopolizing the issuing of money.”

But that, of course, is wishful thinking.

Why does money have value? Typical economists claim that money is valuable because the government declares it so. But that is impossible, given the true origins of money, which are best explained by Austrian economists.

Original Article: “Do People Accept Money Because Government Endorses It?”

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. 

Over the past two weeks, Poland and the Baltic states have all closed their borders to most Russians seeking to cross the border, especially those traveling on tourist visas. The ban on Russian travelers (so far) does not restrict Russians entering Poland the Baltics from other Schengen Area countries. As of last Saturday, however, Finland is also moving toward a ban on Russian travelers and is going further in that it is seeking to restrict even Russians who have visas from elsewhere in Europe. 

The ban in Poland and the Baltic states was perhaps predictable in that those EU member states have long hinted at closing the border to travelers on the justification that too many Russians allegedly support the Russian state’s invasion of eastern Ukraine. 

The issue of border closures is especially sensitive now that there are reports that “thousands” of young men are fleeing Russia to avoid conscription. Reports suggest that many are fleeing to Turkey, but many others have tried escaping to the EU, some via the far northern border that connects to Norway. The wave of wartime emigration appears to have accelerated in recent weeks as the Russian state announced a “partial mobilization” leading to calls for more extensive use of conscription in Russia. 

[Related: “Ukraine’s Regime Is Now Kidnapping Fathers for Military ‘Service’” by Ryan McMaken]

As a result, French diplomat Gérard Araud sought to encourage the Russian emigres seeking to avoid the military draft, tweeting last week that “Helping the men who want to flee from being mobilised would be a humanitarian and military [sic] good decision.”

For their part, however, at least some Baltic politicians are having none of it and appear to be pursuing what might be described as a punitive border policy. Latvia’s foreign affairs minister, for example, is seeking to bar potential Russian immigrants because they did not oppose Moscow early enough to satisfy Baltic politicians. Meanwhile, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas insisted that all Russians are personally responsible for the war in Ukraine. Not surprisingly then, representatives of the Baltic states were quick to declare that Russian conscientious objectors are not to be granted asylum status.

The situation helps to highlight two important issues related to conscription. The first is that granting asylum to people fleeing conscription is the humanitarian thing to do. The second is that it’s a good thing conscripts at least have the option of fleeing across borders to escape the military draft. This is just one of the many benefits of global political decentralization. Even very large and powerful states ultimately face limits on their power at the frontiers.

Conscription Is a Violation of Human Rights —i.e., Property Rights

Araud is right when he says it would be a good thing to help those “who want to flee from being mobilised.” “Mobilised,” is just a euphemism here, however. Forced military service is nothing less than kidnapping and temporary enslavement. For those who die as a result, of course, conscription amounts to a death sentence. Moreover, the act of fleeing conscription has a long tradition. This is why states often also attach draconian punishments to the act of “desertion” or failing to show up for forced military service. 

Thus, many human beings have long sought ways to escape this fate, and we can find a multitude of examples.

For example, Russia itself—under Catherine the Great—offered asylum from the military draft when the regime invited Europeans to settle in Russia. It was mostly Germans who responded, and who became what are now known as Volga Germans. 

[Read More: “America Has Long Been a Haven for Draft Dodgers from Foreign Lands” by Ryan McMaken]

Many families fleeing military service also emigrated to the Americas, and many millions of Americans are descended from so-called “draft dodgers” fleeing regimes in German states, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Eastern Europe. 

Americans themselves have a long and glorious history of draft avoidance. During the American Civil War, for example, many Americans fled abroad. As one historian puts it: “[m]en possessed of robust health suddenly discovered some terrible ailment and had to seek treatment in a different climate. Canada at once became a Mecca for such invalids.”

[Read More: “The Heroic Draft Dodgers of the American Civil War,” by Ryan McMaken]

Those who opposed the draft in this period also did not shy away from using violence to do so. Both men and women were known to physically attack draft agents, seize the agents’ lists of names, and destroy them. 

In all this, of course, those avoiding forced military service were morally justified in doing so. These acts are simply acts of self-defense. 

Thus, when foreign polities offer refuge to these men, they perform a humanitarian act. For the most part, however, states have often been reluctant to define the avoidance of military service as a qualification for asylum. The reasoning for this should be obvious: most states want the continued option of impose their own military draft, so to define foreign conscription in general as a human rights violation would suggest that conscription is morally illegitimate. Clearly, most state regimes don’t want to admit this. Those fleeing conscription nonetheless fit the common definition of refugee which is a displaced person unwilling to return to the country of origin due to a “fear of persecution.” 

Nationalist sentiment can be a factor here as well. It is likely that at least one reason politicians from the Baltic states and Poland are reluctant to accept Russians fleeing conscription is that many voters in these countries simply don’t like Russians and don’t want them there. It’s an understandable sentiment given the historical context, but it doesn’t change the fact that, in principle, those fleeing forced military service are indeed refugees. 

The Benefits of Global Decentralization 

We are fortunate to live in a world where no single state has managed to impose a one-world government. Were that the case, those fleeing government coercion would have no options for escape. A two-state world wouldn’t be much better either, as is shown in the fact that the EU overall is already moving in the direction of barring Russian emigres.

Fortunately, however, the world has hundreds of independent polities. Indeed, Rinkēvičs summed up the situation when he justified Latvia’s closure to Russians on the grounds that “There are … plenty of countries outside [the] EU to go.” He’s right, and fortunately, there are many places in the world beyond the reach of the EU. These places are often harder for Russians to reach, but at least these countries exist independent of the whims of the regimes in both Russia and the EU.

Unfortunately, though, emigration is generally a costly solution. Fleeing one’s home nation with uncertain prospects for a legal return imposes a high cost, indeed. This is always made worse when one is a resident of a very large state where relocation separating from friends and family by hundreds, if not thousands, of miles. Potential Russian emigres also face additional costs if they only speak Russian. Only three countries outside Russia have Russian as an official language. The Russian state has managed to gain a near-monopoly over the Russophone world. 

As imperfect as it is, however, the option of exit is an important limit on the power of states to violate natural rights through conscription, and for many refugees it may indeed be a viable option. 

Joe Biden says the pandemic is over in an attempt to get a few more votes. But the administration certainly isn’t acting like the “pandemic is over” in terms of actual policy.

Original Article: “The Pandemic Is “Over,” but the Feds Aren’t Giving Up Their Emergency Powers”

This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon. 

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There is no doubt that Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan will help the people it is intended to help at everyone else’s expense, as critics correctly point out. The bigger issue is that it does absolutely nothing to lower the costs associated with higher education.

Imagine you accidently shoot yourself in the foot with a nail gun. Enduring incredible pain, you drive to the hospital. Now imagine that the doctor, seeing you in this terrible pain, gives you a prescription for Percocet with infinite refills but does not remove the nail!

Months go by and the pain keeps getting worse, and now you are on the street, looking for heroin. You overdose, but luckily your friend is nearby and he calls the doctor, who arrives on the scene just in time to save you with a shot of Narcan. You tell him that the pain in your foot is getting worse. Thinking of nothing else he can possibly do, he doubles your dosage of Percocet.

In this analogy, Biden is the doctor and the student loan forgiveness plan is the shot of Narcan. According to the Education Data Initiative, the average cost of college tuition, fees, and room and board for a full academic year in 2022 is $35,551. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the figure for 1980 was $2,809. Even after adjusting for inflation, the increase in the cost of a college education is still over 230 percent. What explains this?

In 1965, the federal government began securing student loans under the Higher Education Act. In 1993, the federal government began lending to students directly. Now, in 2022, outstanding student loan debt sits at $1.748 trillion, with nearly all student loans coming from the federal government.

In 1960, 7.7 percent of the US population over the age of twenty-five had graduated college, and by 2021, that measure had grown to 37.9 percent. Some may try and point to this increase in the demand for higher education, influenced by the abundance of lax and easy loans, as an explanation for the exponential rise in college costs. After all, the law of supply states that, other things held constant, suppliers will only supply more of a good at higher prices. However, other things have not held constant. The federal government has been ready and willing to loan more to meet every single increase in price.

Since 1965, universities have been sheltered from market forces. Because student loans will continually increase to meet the rising costs, universities have no incentive to compete based on price. In fact, they have every incentive to keep raising prices because this hasn’t resulted in lower attendance.

With less regard for costs and pricing, schools feel pressured to compete for students by other means, adding things such as indoor swimming pools, lazy rivers, rock-climbing walls, and unions for students of every marginal identity, as well as creating nonsensical administrative roles like diversity officers and a dean of diversity for every department, all of which increase costs.

Grade inflation, the phenomenon of awarding progressively higher grades over time by lowering academic rigor, has perhaps been the most insidious way to compete. No young person wants to take out thousands a semester in debt for courses they can’t pass, and being cash cows, no college wants to lose prospective students or have them fail out because their courses are too difficult. In 1960, only about 15 percent of grades awarded were As. By 2012, As had grown to 45 percent of all letter grades awarded.

It was after the Higher Education Act of 1965 that the first modern pseudodisciplines appeared in the university. In the early 1970s, the first courses in women’s studies were offered in universities. As it became easier to be admitted to and to finance college, schools felt pressure to offer paths of study for people with varying interests and varying intellectual ability. Absent government loans, cultural Marxism courses would be too impractical to exist.

Because loans are so easy to obtain in such large amounts, young people are less encouraged to make responsible decisions. For example, attending a community college for their general education requirements and later commuting to their nearest university. Or curbing their interest in Marxism and pursuing a two-year technical degree instead. To their credit, many borrowers chose these more practical options, given that Biden’s loan forgiveness is estimated to eliminate the debt of one-third of borrowers.

All of this has diminished the real value of degrees by creating a giant college bubble. The bachelor’s degree is the new high school diploma, and we aren’t any smarter for it. Generally, the more abundant a good becomes, the lower its price should be. Government loans are the cause of exorbitant college costs. Without them, the abundance and lower value of degrees would be reflected in their price.

The exponential rise in the cost of a college education simply would not have been possible without government student loans. It is the definition of moral hazard in the extreme. The government doesn’t need to worry about profit and loss. It doesn’t need to worry about going out of business, because it is bankrolled by the taxpayers in perpetuity. The opposite is true of private lenders in a free market. They would have to consider many things, like SAT scores and high school performance. They might even want the student to take an IQ test. But most importantly, they would need to know what the student is going to study. A premed or engineering student would be a far greater prospect for a loan than a gender studies major. The federal government considers nothing because it doesn’t care how much of our money is wasted.

At the thought of facing the real world, every eighteen-year-old is filled with existential dread. It is understandable that they would like to avoid it for four more years. But it is morally outrageous to ask their peers who went straight into the workforce to pay for it.

The solutions to student loan debt and the costs of higher education are simple, obvious, and one and the same. The federal government must stop offering student loans and allow borrowers to file for bankruptcy. Economists have known this for a long time. Unfortunately, this harsh reality is so politically unpopular that both the public and their representatives are in complete denial of it. Instead of recognizing the trend and correcting their missteps, they have stepped further in the wrong direction at every moment of decision and continue to do so.

The sad, but hopeful, truth is that with modern technology, the vast majority of higher education could be offered at lower costs than ever before. Many world-class professors post their lectures to YouTube. Working people with intellectual interests buy products from the Great Courses to listen to throughout their day. Interactive educational systems like MyMathLab, by Pearson, make learning calculus easier than learning one-on-one with a professor. If the government would get out of the student loan business, market forces would be restored to higher education. The result could be glorious.

So-called recession and recovery are false metrics. The falsity comes from focusing on the total earned by all people, not the total earned on average by a given individual.

If in total, people earn one percent more, but in total, the population is two percent more, then on average a given individual earns one percent less. On average, a given individual is in a recession if the total earnings per person are decreasing. On average, a given individual is in a recovery only if the total earnings per person are increasing.

The false metrics of so-called recession and recovery push individuals’ expectations lower. With expectations lower, government people can more easily claim to have made us beat these expectations. (“Don’t believe what you see around you, believe what we tell you.”) This helps enable government people to continue to mess with our earnings and mess with us.

A genuine measure of economic performance would be the real net voluntary value-added per capita:

• Real to roughly correct for inflation, so inflation doesn’t make earnings seem larger when purchasing power isn’t larger.
• Net to correct for increasing debt and for capital equipment consumption, so debt-fueled spending doesn’t make earnings seem larger, and so wearing out of capital equipment doesn’t make earnings seem larger.
• Voluntary to focus on the earnings that individuals spend or save themselves, so the earnings that governments take and spend for their cronies don’t make earnings sound larger.
• Per capita to correct for population changes, so in migration of less productive people doesn’t make earnings seem larger.

So then this mouthful—real net voluntary value-added per capita—is, on average, roughly the real value that’s added by a given individual and that’s controlled by that individual. In short, this is roughly, on average, people’s genuine, personally useful earnings.

Note that these measured earnings don’t count all the value added, but are only lower-bound minimums. The actual value added is higher. From the start, every customer values essentially every product he purchases more highly than the price he pays. Over time, every customer also ends up 7learning more about a product’s attributes as he uses the product, and on average ends up valuing the product even-more highly. And every customer fully benefits from innovations only sometime after they’re first created, once the innovations get used in as many products as will benefit from the innovations.

And although all such unrecorded added value goes unquantified, qualitatively it’s plausible to expect that the total of such unrecorded added value will tend to decrease when the added value decreases, will tend to remain constant when the added value remains constant, and will tend to increase when the added value increases.

After all, economic growth always reflects change. Change always is driven by opportunities. Opportunities largely are seized by innovating. And innovations cost customers less than they’re worth to customers.

When people earn more, individuals on average get wealthier. When people earn less, individuals on average get poorer.

For people to earn more, individuals have to add more value in each of their roles:

• Individuals acting as investors have to choose to place more of their money at risk up front in order to generate returns in the future.
• Individuals acting as producers have to choose to direct more resources to projects that will be at risk upfront in order to earn profits in the future.
• Individual workers have to prepare themselves to succeed in these projects and in the resulting production, and have to succeed in these projects and in this production. They have to earn more.
• Individuals acting as customers have to choose sooner or later to buy more products.

Each such action of individuals takes adequate information, skill, and effort. This information is limited, these skills are limited, and these efforts can only be supplied at limited rates. As a result, these efforts have to extend over consequential durations of time. True recovery takes time.

There are no shortcuts to taking the required actions, and to having these efforts extend over consequential durations of time. Learning curves are real. After all, if everyone already knew what to do to add more value and already had the capital equipment in place to add more value, then everyone would already be adding more value. In this case, wealth would chiefly be increasing only incrementally due to saving, not substantially also due to significantly adapting and reconfiguring.

Government officials lack information comparable to what individuals as a whole possess. Government people also lack skills comparable to what individuals as a whole will have. Government people have fewer resources and less time than individuals as a whole have.

Even if government people had comparable information, resources, and time, government people would lack the right to substitute their wishes for individuals’ wishes. Individuals are sovereign over their own actions. Government people are not sovereign over individuals’ actions.

These circumstance hold true now, and these circumstances will hold true for all time. In these circumstances, government people can do only one thing that will help individuals get wealthier: get themselves out of individuals’ ways, and get their colleagues out of individuals’ ways.

Borrowing and spending doesn’t increase wealth. Adding value increases wealth.

Increasing wealth requires letting less-economic producers fail, letting more-economic producers use more resources, letting people move to where they will add more value, letting people add more value, and letting people choose to buy products that they value more.

All together, increasing wealth takes less government, and increasing wealth takes time. The less government, the less time it takes to increase wealth, and the greater the rate that wealth increases.