How demands for governments to 'do something about it' work:

With a few exceptions contemporary commentators on economic problems are advocating economic intervention. This unanimity does not necessarily mean that they approve of interventionistic measures by government or other coer­cive powers. Authors of economics books, essays, articles, and political platforms demand interventionistic measures before they are taken, but once they have been imposed no one likes them. Then everyone - usually even the authori­ties responsible for them — call them insufficient and unsat­isfactory. Generally the demand then arises for the replace­ment of unsatisfactory interventions by other, more suitable measures. And once the new demands have been met, the same scenario begins all over again. The universal desire for the interventionist system is matched by the rejection of all concrete measures of the interventionist policy.

This is from Kritik des Interventionismus, 1929, republished in 1976 as A Critique of Interventionism, Translation copyright 1977 by Margit von Mises. It appears in full on the Ludwig Von Mises website here.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in General • NHS

Comments (0) TrackBack (40)