Divorce laws that enable women to easily leave an unpleasant marriage may sound like a threat to the family. But with women choosing not to marry in large numbers, the family is not only declining, that decline is threatening to take the richer Asian societies down with it. If Asian societies are to return to the fertility rates of around 2.2 that are necessary to survive and prosper, marriage will have to become more pleasant for women than it is today. And that will only come about when it is easier for women to leave bad ones.

Milton Friedman said there is only good economics and bad economics, not schools of economic thought.

The idea that manufacturing jobs are more valuable and pay higher wages than other jobs, especially service industry jobs, is simply not true.

This is the Cantillon effect posited by Irish economist and Adam Smith predecessor Richard Cantillon: price inflation is relative and staggered as “newly created is distributed neither equally nor simultaneously among the population.” Picture banks and their favored borrowers with access to the Fed’s zero interest rate program borrowing dollars and investing in assets that have either higher yields like Treasuries or long-term security like gold. Later on, consumers without those resources or sophistication are punished at the gas pump and grocery story by the resulting price inflation. Printing money doesn’t just cause financial disorder; it stokes inequality.

It is that (1) we have had a speed-up in technological change, and (2) the technocrats have too much power and too little knowledge. The technocratic approaches to bank capital regulation, U.S. housing policy, and European integration have failed spectacularly, illustrating the knowledge-power discrepancy.

Many government interventions in markets though they are often justified in terms of the ‘public interest’ work to the disproportionate benefit of organised interests – often the rich or relatively rich – and at the expense of the unorganised and often relatively poor.

And, I might add, if Aristotle were around today, I very much doubt he would think that the distinction between renting yourself or members of your family out to work and selling yourself or members of your family to work was more than a legal nicety. He’d probably conclude that most Americans were, for all intents and purposes, slaves.

It is instructive to recall what made America an economic engine in the first place. The Industrial Revolution did not cross the Atlantic in the 19th century because of superior central-banking policies, well-timed “internal improvements” by Whig politicians, progressive taxation, or government stimulus aimed at politically important industries. In fact, we saw quite the opposite: a constitutionally restrained central government, a money supply set to a strict commodity standard, and the development of property-rights institutions that both encouraged capital formation and attracted capital from all over the world. The resulting capital stock meant there were jobs at some wage available to anyone who wanted to work. Indeed, unemployment as a social problem is a 20th-century invention resulting from Progressive Era policies that increased the cost of capital and labor.