When proponents of government intervention make their case, it is nearly always in terms of intent. “X is bad, Y would be better, and we need government intervention to get Y.” The fact that government intervention often yields Z, and Z is worse than X, is forever being overlooked.

I wouldn’t have thought that the question of why working class marriage rates have fallen would be a sharply partisan issues. But since Charles Murray decided that moral decay is to blame, many of his critics have started countering that poor economic outlook for working class men over the past decade is the issue. The obvious third hypothesis, it seems to me, is that with women’s social and economic opportunities much improved over the past several decades they’re less reliant on marriage as a form of social and economic support.

In other words, no matter how much the Fed and the Administration try to flog the economy, nothing has really worked. As much as Bernanke boasted about being able to prevent another depression, he and the Bush-Obama Administrations have done everything they could to make things worse. And the classic indicators of a depression are still playing out and reminding us of the inefficacy and incompetence of conventional economic wisdom.

That banks get ever bigger, that they routinely hand out multi-million dollar bonuses, and that they frequently get bailed out, is not a result of the greed of the bankers – a stupid explanation anyway, only satisfactory to the intellectually challenged and perennially envious – but is integral to the fiat money system.

Capitalism vigorously pursued might produce trade cycles and long periods of high unemployment; it might produce anxiety in yesterday’s successful entrepreneurs who now face competition from today’s upstart entrepreneurs; it might cause too many people to become obese; it might kill off animal species in unusually high numbers; it might cause the earth’s climate to change; it might create asset bubbles; it might spark envy and over-work in the Smiths who are trying to keep up with their neighbors, the Joneses. It might do these things and others that reasonable people might regard as unfortunate in comparison with some imaginable paradise. But we must never lose sight of this important asymmetry: complete or near-complete state control of the economy is proven to generate deep impoverishment and tyranny

Fewer workers in farming (or retail) means more workers producing more goods in other industries. The same basic lesson holds throughout an economy, it is the declining sectors that allow other sectors to advance. Instantaneously? Immediately? With higher wages for every worker? No. Transitions always involve some pain; creation always involves some destruction; growth always involves change. The alternative, however, is stagnation. The politics of growth are difficult because those who lose from change are always present and are often more numerous and perhaps even more deserving than the present winners, the capitalists, the business people, the international mega corps; but today’s losses and gains are fleeting, the permanent winners are the workers and consumers of the future who will know only the benefits of productivity.

To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, a lot of charitable endeavors are not about actually helping people so much as they are about showing that we are on the side of the angels. For some people who immerse themselves in the economic way of thinking, the Dismal Science helps them look past their (selfish? greedy?) fixation on others’ approval and shows them that a dollar might alleviate more human suffering if it is put in the bank rather than a donation box.

Ever since the U.S. economy began to tremble, Republicans and Democrats have been been trying to goose the consumer with temporary tax cuts, alongside an assortment of deficit-spending schemes. Even if temporary tax cuts do work and are regarded by consumers as found money to be spent quickly, the deficit spending tells the citizen that taxes will go up in the future, so that it’s advisable to save any found money. The tax cut also makes Social Security less self-supporting and more of a welfare program supported by general revenue. The $112 billion not raised by the Social Security tax is to be “offset” by injecting Treasury bonds into the Social Security Trust Fund, which promises higher taxes in the future. If consumers are capable of telling the difference between found money and fool’s gold, Congress should try a different kind of stimulus.