I am constantly amazed at the utter lack of knowledge possessed by elected officials at every level of civil government.  I sincerely doubt that more than one out of a thousand have within the last year read a single book about economics or the philosophy of government.  Yet they will freely make the most appalling decisions about your finances and your business in an instant.

Decided recently to re-read a book entitled Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt.  It is a classic in every sense of the word.  First printed in 1946, it has never been out of print.  It contains twenty-five chapters of absolute precious truth.

I can be rather confident in saying that no one in the past several administrations of the Columbian Empire has ever read it...or paid attention to what they read.  As proof, I offer a portion of a paragraph from Chapter VI.

The advocates of government-guaranteed mortgages also forget that what is being lent is ultimately real capital, which is limited in supply, and that they are helping identified B at the expense of some unidentified A.  Government-guaranteed home mortgages, especially when a negligible down payment or no down payment whatever is required, inevitably mean more bad loans than otherwise.  They force the general taxpayer to subsidize the bad risks and to defray the losses.  They encourage people to "buy" houses that they cannot really afford.  They tend eventually to bring about an oversupply of houses as compared with other things.  They temporarily overstimulate building, raise the cost of building for everybody (including the buyers of the homes with the guaranteed mortgages), and may mislead the building industry into an eventually costly overexpansion.  In brief, in the long run they do not increase overall national production but encourage malinvestment.

Nuf said.  We have problems because those running the show are uninformed idiots.  We have those idiots creating the problems because Joe Plumber won't get off his throne long enough to learn anything himself.  Joe enjoys electing politicians whose education stopped at "How to Get Elected."

Give me a people yearning to be free.  Give me a people who will not be satisfied with a diploma, but desire to be educated.  Then we will have a Free Tennessee.

From Solitude,
David O Jones

P.S. Economics in One Lesson can be ordered from the Ludwig von Mises Institute.