If we want to promote human flourishing and avoid human suffering, it is crucial that we challenge the ideal of government ‘redistribution’ of wealth and regulation of the economy and advocate reason, freedom and individual rights instead.
Work is a crucially important value. When productive, work gives us not only the material means of survival and enjoyment of life, but it is also the main source of self-esteem and provides a central purpose that makes the rest of our values achievable by helping prioritize them.
We owe to John Locke and those other thinkers complementary to his political philosophy of man, society and government all the freedom and prosperity that mankind has known and enjoyed over the last 300 years, beginning in Europe and North America and then spreading imperfectly to other parts of the world.
Rather than complaining about ‘unfairly’ low corporate taxes paid by Apple and others, we would be better off advocating low, and eventually no, corporate taxes, more wealth creation, strong protection of individual rights by governments–and capitalism.
Austrian Economics is the most powerful explanation of why governments, no matter how well-intentioned, lack the knowledge, wisdom and ability to direct the lives of multitudes of people better than those people can do for themselves.
Let us not forget that over the last hundred years virtually every form of collectivism has been tried – socialism, communism, fascism, Nazism, interventionism, welfare statism – and each has failed. There is only one “ism” left to fill this vacuum in the face of collectivism’s failures.
As appeasement and pursuit of ‘social license’ is futile, other oil and pipeline executives should follow Girling’s example and defend their companies on moral grounds for the great value they provide. Governments, for their part, should cease their welfare-destroying climate change policies and focus on protecting individual rights instead.
The Soviet nightmare of “socialism-in-practice” was over.
The multiplier’s significance to monetary policy is, or used to be, straightforward: it indicated the quantity of additional bank deposits that monetary authorities could expect to see banks produce in response to any increment of new bank reserves supplied them by means of either open-market operations or direct central bank loans.
CAPITALISM REVIEW