Rumford

Sounds like a really interesting book! I read the synopsis and the mainstream is sorely in need of a approach that acknowledges the extreme complexity and heterogeneity of an economy. Nothing irks me more than to see Paul Krugman speak of the world as if it can be quantified in a handful of "aggregate" variables and then blame his political enemies any time things don't go according to plan.

Your instincts are not wrong, believe it or not. Unfortunately most economists fall short of the current state of their science. The first thing one needs to understand about economics is how rife it is with special pleading from selfish interests, because the output of economic science is so important to justifying public policy prescriptions. One thing that is constantly ignored is how government fiddling with the interest rate has a way of warping the capital structure into unsustainable configurations. You don't need an economics Nobel Prize to know that when Venezuela puts price controls on food the grocery stores go empty. But there are much more powerful special interests served by price controls on borrowed capital, so a lot of effort goes into willfuly bad "economics" aimed at justifying the practice.

The truth will out, complicated character-assassination plots notwithstanding.

Imagine what would happen if the Pentagon were held to Sarbanes-Oxley the way private businesses are.

The existence of central planning anywhere in Western financial systems is even more insulting. After watching the examples of our good neighbors to the East you'd think we would have learned our lesson by now.

The latter half of the 19th century up to WW1 was the USA's longest sustained period of high growth and high economic mobility. No central bank. Moderate deflation was the norm. According to the likes of Paul Krugman Americans should have been eating dirt and living in caves by 1913, but the exact opposite happened. Growth that the Keynesian technocrats have yet to match.

Except even then, government intervention in money fixed a certain price ratio of gold and silver. When that ratio no longer reflected the real market prices, chaos predictably appeared in the banking system. Go back over the history of the late 19th century panics and you'll notice one metal was fleeing the country and causing a lot of controversy. That's a government price control at work, not unfettered capitalism. The Federal Reserve Act was the wrong solution.

And yet even with the Fed, there's the stubborn little fact of the crash of 1920 -- bigger than that of 1929 -- and the rapid recovery that followed. The Fed, Congress and the Presidency did basically nothing and it was over in 18 months. So judging from the objective facts laying before us, it looks like the central planners perform best when they avoid central planning.

Well, one satirical short story and actual historical socialism's mountains of corpses.

Like maybe don't put a Soviet-style central committee in charge of the money supply?

It's depressing to me that modern economies like the US and Europe can be so shot through with central planning, and then when they produce bad results everyone pretends it's the fault of some freewheeling laizzes-faire policy that never existed.

Ever read Harrison Bergeron?

Making everyone equally happy is impossible, so the regime ultimately resorts to making everyone equally miserable.

Past experience makes me pretty confident of what I'll find this time.

Point taken, and I'm glad you see the merit in the discussion about what things the state has any right to do. After all, sometimes trespassing is the right thing to do. I certainly hope the fire department doesn't wait to be invited if they notice my house is burning down!

I guess I'm just extremely certain that after studying the lineage of a ban like this, one would discover that no, it really isn't necessary. Maybe I'll go test that hypothesis later.

What if they already are? I can think of a handful of newsletters that command a three-figure annual subscription price. The people who buy them must regard them as useful and of sufficient quality. It could be that the rabble of news sites drowning in ads are mostly schlock, and that their business model is one of attempting to monetize some of your least-attentive moments.

> "Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up"

I'm a big believer in Chesterton's Fence too, but what do you do about fences put up by someone who had no right to put it there? If someone erected a wall through the middle of your kitchen, would you have the same reticence to tear it down? The way I see it, the state has no right to enforce a ban like this, and we would be justified in ignoring and circumventing it.

The simplest thing I could suggest is to repeal all government-enforced occupational licensing. For heaven's sake you need a state license just to give manicures. In America.

This includes everything from manicurists to medical doctors. Repealing these would do two things. First, it would eliminate an unnecessary barrier of entry into a wide variety of occupations, unleashing a great many new job opportunities. Second, it would give consumers -- particularly the poor -- access to low-cost alternatives that today are illegal. Government approval is no guarantee of quality anyway. We don't need it.

I would also suggest eliminating the Federal Reserve System and its monetary policy of gradual inflation. America's period of greatest economic growth was between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War I. Under a regime of moderate deflation the economy grew 4% year-over-year for a sustained period. Living standards rose across the board. Economic mobility was high. I believe this to be directly attributable to the incentives that exist under a monetary policy of slow deflation: saving is rewarded, prices fall over time, yet innovation and wise investment are greatly rewarded. (Gradual inflation, on the other hand, impels people to borrow and borrow a lot, which just on its own reduces one's economic mobility. Excessive borrowing can also be understood as consuming too much in the present at the cost of the future, which is where the boom-bust cycle comes from. Gradual inflation also makes saving extremely difficult. Anyone who doesn't want their savings to erode over time is forced to become a speculator. It subsidizes Wall Street at the expense of every holder of Dollars.)