10 unpopular but useful things to keep in mind while listening to 'business', 'investment' or 'economics' podcasts and news:
1. Monopolies are sustained by tariffs, regulations, and taxes that limit competition.
Government barriers protect existing firms, preventing new and efficient entrants and disruptors.
2. Price controls distort incentives, leading to shortages or surpluses.
Artificial price caps discourage production, while floors create unsellable excess supply. This applies to wage controls also.
3. Civilization requires private property because it enables economic calculation and long-term planning.
Without private or 'homesteaded' ownership, individuals lack incentives to invest, innovate, or conserve resources. Public companies tend to be a drain on the exchequer.
4. Cartels tend to collapse in a free market due to competition and internal incentives to cheat.
Each member benefits from undercutting prices, making collusion unsustainable long-term.
5. Value is subjective; there is no such thing as intrinsic economic value.
It depends on individual and subjective preferences, not inherent properties, backing or production costs.
6. Artificially cheap credit and subsidies lead to malinvestment, overproduction, and inevitable recession.
Distorted signals like centrally planned interest rates misallocate resources, creating bubbles that must eventually burst.
7. Savings drive capital accumulation and productivity growth, not consumption.
Deferred consumption funds investment, enabling technological progress and higher future output. This cannot be artificially enforced without causing long-term destruction. Check point 6.
8. Money printing causes inflation. Law of diminishing marginal utility has not been refuted or disproved.
And the government will not stop printing money, ever.
9. Societies and economies cannot be planned, even with a quantum computer. Both are inherently bottom up in their functioning. Any attempt at it is an act of destruction.
10. Governments and their direct beneficiaries, (labour and business), will never accept any of the above because denying these benefit them.