We should recognize that government does not protect us against the evils of the market, and that its rhetorical posing as consumer advocate is both dishonest and dangerous. Instead, what we need is more reliance on the market to protect us against the evils of ill-advised government policies and grandstanding.

Greece’s problem is simple, they have too much debt and not enough growth and handing them more money isn’t going to fix that, it just buys time and the market says time is up.

To those who have been accustomed to the possession, or even to the hope of public admiration, all other pleasures sicken and decay. Of all the discarded statesmen who for their own ease have studied to get the better of ambition, and to despise those honours which they could no longer arrive at, how few have been able to succeed? The greater part have spent their time in the most listless and insipid indolence, chagrined at the thoughts of their own insignificancy, incapable of being interested i n the occupations of private life, without enjoyment, except when they talked of their former greatness, and without satisfaction, except when they were employed in some vain project to recover it. Are you in earnest resolved never to barter your liberty for the lordly servitude of a court, but to live free, fearless, and independent? There seems to be one way to continue in that virtuous resolution; and perhaps but one. Never enter the place from whence so few have been able to return; never come within the circle of ambition; nor ever bring yourself into comparison with those masters of the earth who have already engrossed the attention of half mankind before you.

The WSJ story meanders around for a cause but never mentions Cash for Clunkers, the most cockamamie scheme for deliberate destruction in our time. Some 600,000 cars were destroyed after being bought by the government, for a total per taxpayer expenditure of $24,000 each. Then we wonder why used car prices soar!

Four years on, why is the housing market still falling? The obvious culprit is the homebuyer’s tax credit. Even as it was enacted, a lot of people were complaining that gimmicks like this (and the Cash for Clunkers program) weren’t providing useful stimulus; instead, they were distorting the market by pulling demand forward from future years. That seems to be even truer than most people expected.

The government spent trillions fixing real estate. It didn’t work. Those who fight the price system are destined to lose every time.

Irish taxpayers should not suffer from voting out one set of clowns in a landslide election only to have the new set of clowns adopt the identical policy.

Economically literate opponents of the Detroit bailout never denied that pumping hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into Detroit automakers would restore those companies to health. Instead, they argued, first, that bailing out Detroit takes resources from other valuable uses. Because he doesn’t even recognize that other valuable uses were sacrificed by this bailout, Mr. Dionne offers no reason to think that the value of saving Detroit automakers exceeds the value of what was sacrificed to do so. No legitimate declaration that the bailout is successful is possible, however, without evidence that the value of what was saved exceeds the value of what was sacrificed.

Almost everyone now acknowledges that federal entitlement programs, crowned by the enormously costly healthcare systems the Great Society spawned, have promised much greater benefits than the government can fund, and hence that many of these benefits will have to be cut, notwithstanding the political fury such cuts surely will elicit. This impending sociopolitical tumult represents one of the Great Society’s bitterest fruits.

Plans in private markets are decentralized; government plans are centralized. Private-market planners risk their own money; government planners risk other-people’s money. Plans in private markets face constant competition from rival private plans; government plans are monopolies which face no such competition. This competition prevents plans in private markets from growing in scope to outstrip the knowledge and capacities of persons who make and carry them out. No such competitive check constrains the scope of government plans. Finally, plans in private markets – unlike government-made plans – often cross-pollinate with each other to inspire the creation and discovery of entirely new possibilities that would remain unknown without such decentralized planning within competitive markets. Government ‘plans’ almost inevitably suppress such possibilities of cross-pollination, creation, and discovery.