In general, be skeptical of arguments that there are fabulous savings in money and efficiency to be gained by “eliminating the middleman”. The phrase is a favorite with infomercial hucksters for a reason–it’s the sort of thing that sounds really plausible and intuitive. But in fact, since most people don’t like paying more than they have to for their goods and services, and producers do not willingly give up a share of the profits, if there’s a middleman in a market, he’s usually there for a reason.

Go to all the advocates of “prevention” and early detection, and ask them if they’ve heard of Bayesian probability, or indeed any of the dismal economic reviews that most prevention and screening programs have. They will just look confused or irritated.

The reality is that the public does not respond to most events, or most changes in the income distribution, as the intelligentsia likes to think it should, or will.

It turns out that the real chaos comes when the state attempts to allocate scarce resources rather than leaving it to the price system and its talent for revealing what is economically rational or irrational. Shop-closing laws presume to tell people how they should use their time. But time, writes Mises, is a scarce resource; man “must economize it as he economizes other scarce factors.” Only private actors — not politicians and bureaucrats — are in a position to make decisions concerning how it is used. Their choices can be accessed based on a business model rather than arbitrary political wrangling. This is why liberty works and the state fails so miserably, and why the best-laid plans in politics never work out as expected.

The most probable conjecture is that he was actuated by an inordinate, an unscrupulous, a remorseless zeal for what seemed to him to be the interest of the state. This explanation may startle those who have not considered how large a proportion of the blackest crimes recorded in history is to be ascribed to ill regulated public spirit. We daily see men do for their party, for their sect, for their country, for their favourite schemes of political and social reform, what they would not do to enrich or to avenge themselves. At a temptation directly addressed to our private cupidity or to our private animosity, whatever virtue we have takes the alarm. But virtue itself may contribute to the fall of him who imagines that it is in his power, by violating some general rule of morality, to confer an important benefit on a church, on a commonwealth, on mankind. He silences the remonstrances of conscience, and hardens his heart against the most touching spectacles of misery, by repeating to himself that his interventions are pure, that his objects are noble, that he is doing a little evil for the sake of a great good. By degrees he comes altogether to forget the turpitude of the means in the excellence of the end, and at length perpetrates without one internal twinge acts which would shock a buccaneer.

If half of us were billionaires, mopping up any residual human poverty with voluntary charity would be child’s play.

And it’s too bad some of those currently unemployed are barred from pursuing work and building full lives due to the belief held by many that to work is to be exploited.

Cost advantages for manufacturing are starting to shift back to America because of rising wages in China, along with rising prices there in general and an appreciating currency.