Started reading the classic “Economic Fallacies” by Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) written after WWI to address the destructive economic policies being legislated. I find it interesting that the French government was destroying the economy with the same ill conceived ideas that the Democrats are now inflicting on America. Bastiat says:
“Restrictive laws always land us in this dilemma:
Either you admit that they produce scarcity, or you do not.
If you admit it, you avow by the admission that you inflict on the people all the injury in your power. If you do not admit it, you deny having restricted the supply and raised prices, and consequently you deny having favoured the producer.
What you do is either hurtful or profitless, injurious or ineffectual. It never can be attended with useful result.”
Gas prices? Health care? Health insurance?
Also:
“According to the first system, wealth is the result of labour ….
The second system teaches that it is the effort itself which constitutes the measure of wealth. ….
The first system naturally welcomes everything which tends to diminish pains and augment products; …
Logically, the second invokes everything which has the effect of increasing pains and diminishing products; privileges, monopolies, restrictions, prohbitions, suppression of machinery, sterility, etc
It is well to remark that the universal practice of mankind always points to the principle of the first system. We have never seen, we shall never see, a man who labours for himself in any department, be he agriculturist, manufacturer, merchant, artificer, soldier, author, or philosopher, who does not devote all the powers of his mind to work better, to work with more rapidity, to work more economically – in a word, to effect more with less.
The opposite doctrine is in favour only with theorists, members of parliament, journalists, statesmen, ministers – men, in short, born to make experiments on the social body.
At the same time, we may observe, that in what concerns themselves personally they act as everyone else does, on the principle of obtaining from labour the greatest possible amount of useful results.”
Preach it brother!