Imagine you are the foreman of a factory. Inside the factory are two machines. Both machines consume materials, energy, and labor and produce the same product, perhaps cars, or toasters, or pencils. However, one of the machines, given the same inputs, produces far fewer of that product. Assume that inputs for maintenance to keep the machines running indefinitely are included in the consumption numbers. The question you need to answer as foreman is how to divide the resources between the two machines.The answer seems obvious: Put all your resources into the better machine! Some fraction of the resources put into the inefficient machine will be wasted, so unless your inputs are extremely abundant and the demand for products is exceedingly desperate, leave the inefficient machine alone and

One hears this kind of thing from modern monetary theory (MMT) advocates whenever their economic theories are attacked: “We say not spending constrained,” they grumble, “We don’t mean ‘now spend’.” However, what politicians hear is that they can have anything they really want because they can just print the money for it. “It’s a fact,” an MMTer might say. “Sovereign governments with their own currencies can never go bankrupt. They can always print more money.”
This myopic gibberish is what I affectionately call “the MMT-and-bailey fallacy,” which I named for its similarity to the motte-and-bailey fallacy. In this case, the “motte” is the idea that sovereign governments can’t go bankrupt. It’s technically true. The United States government can always print more dollars. The “bailey” is the

While George Orwell wrote magnificently against totalitarianism, his attempt to defend socialism in The Road to Wigan Pier stumbled badly.

Original Article: "Review: Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier"

George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier is a book for which I kept hearing recommendations. I was told that it contained biting criticisms of socialism and was a valuable source of antiauthoritarian thought.
What I found, instead, was a snobbish text that ineffectually denounces snobbery, an erudite-sounding text that lacks any philosophical or economic depth, and a persistent veil of ignorance over and presumption in favor of state intervention for any of the problems described, as well as the shortsighted implication that the solution is simply more of the same.
The book was first published in 1937, which is long after the Soviets abandoned war communism in 1921, after the end of the New Economic Policy in 1928, and even after the state-engineered Ukraine famine from 1930–33. Ludwig von

Ludwig von Mises’s book The Theory of Money and Credit is a masterwork of monetary theory. Despite being written in the early twentieth century, its arguments and conclusions are still valid and interesting today. Mises describes five characteristics that are vital to the function of money: marketability, durability, fungibility, trustworthiness, and convenience.