I wanted to clear up a few things that have come up in the conference so far.
When Dr. Salerno was talking about fear of deflation or deflation phobia,
he mentioned that I had coined this term.
That's supposed to be an A there, but it's more authentic.
In order to coin a fear, an official psychological fear,
I learned that you use the name of whatever the person is afraid of in Greek, and then you add phobia.
And so I knew this person who had helped me out in the past, who was a Greek translator, an academic, and so forth,
and he had helped me out in the past, and so I emailed him and asked him to give me the translation for deflation phobia.
A couple of days later, I figured, you know, you could get it right off the tip of your tongue,
but it turns out there's really not a word in Greek for deflation.
Apparently, in the Greek society, they either had stable money or inflation.
And he sends me back this, apoplit horosmos phobia.
And so I tried to start breaking that down.
Obviously, phobia is the fear of.
And so I figured it was a pop in the price level.
And so I sent him back my sort of retranslation and he said, no, that's not quite it.
There was no term for deflation, so he had to sort of make something up, which didn't mean anything.
So he wrote me back and said, no, it really means this, which was just a series of Greek symbols,
which again didn't help me very much.
And this guy had been helpful in the past.
A friend of mine who is Greek had put me onto him a number of years before,
when I had sort of been pushed into politics, into running for office.
And I was a little intimidated by that being a Yankee New Yorker coming down to Alabama
in Alabama and being sort of pushed into the political realm and so I've been
asking my friends for advice and my Greek friend recommended I contact his
cousin, the Greek translator, to get to the very basics of what politics was and
so I asked him to to translate that for me and this time he came back and he
He said, well, you know what, in Greek, what poly means, it means many or several, and I said, yeah, polynumerals and all that kind of stuff.
He says, you know what ticks are, and I said, well, I don't know what that means.
He said, well, they're a bunch of infectious, blood-sucking parasites.
And so politics at that point became very clear to me.
Another thing I wanted to clear up my really brilliant point that I was going to make the other day doesn't seem quite as momentous as at this point but it was on Nick's good question about the lack of development in Africa where you know it's put forward that there was just an absence of capital rather than the rule of law as Nick pointed out and I'm sure Murray would would agree with him at that point
on that point, but you have to remember, and this is again a good lesson about
Man Economy and State and how it's actually structured.
First of all, there's lots of reasons, possible reasons for the lack of capital,
including the rule of law, but there's also simply that people don't have a preference
for putting, for savings and building up capital.
They might have a particular ideological bias against accumulating capital and they prefer to live, you know, in thatch huts and very little clothing.
You can think of the survivor, you know, TV shows, people like that, or just some sort of religious bias against accumulating capital, such as we might find in Tibet.
So there are lots of natural reasons for the absence of capital, but of course at this part in Man Economy and State,
Rothbard is assuming that we have a free society with the rule of law, based on libertarian property rights based systems,
so that he naturally wouldn't bring into focus the absence of the rule of law at that particular point.
Okay, with respect to triangular intervention, Rothbard first of course lays out autistic
intervention where the state is coming to you as an individual and intervening in your
lives in some way, and then what is to follow this lecture on binary intervention where
where the state again intervenes in your life in the form of taking away your property,
taxing you, requiring that you provide the state with certain gifts.
And then there's triangular intervention where the state intervenes between transactions
and exchanges between various individuals and business forms out there in the economy.
So that's going to be the focus of this lecture.
One of the questions that was raised with respect to this chapter was, you know, what
is Rothbard's contributions here, because a lot of the actual interventions that he
goes over are familiar to some economists, or some of them are familiar to many economists.
But the overall basic topology of interventions that Rothbard provides in Man Economy and
State is a contribution.
It's a contribution that he lays out the whole extent, not comprehensive, but gives
you the full extent of the types of government interventions that do exist and then breaks
them down into categories.
So that's a contribution and also it gives you a good flavor for single triangular interventions
and then when you look at the whole broad base of triangular interventions it gives
you an understanding of how chaotic a market economy can become when you have each and
every one of these interventions as well as many others.
And then, of course, as Walter pointed out, it also gives you, looking back, it gives
you a good picture of what the free society really is.
Because in the absence of all these interventions, including things like defense, you get a good
picture of what society is.
So he is laying out an understanding of society to begin with in Man Economy and State, and
and then bringing in all of these interventions and of course what he's pointing out is that
these interventions reduce social welfare. They cannot increase social welfare, they
only decrease it. Triangular intervention is what most economists think of when they
when I think of intervention, regulations, price controls, things of that nature.
And so these are a lot of the most common types of interventions that we see in the real world.
With respect to autistic and binary, autistic and binary types of interventions, people generally understand.
They see them and they understand them.
You know, if you were forced to salute to the flag or you're forced to salute to the ruler or to the fuhrer,
you know, you would have a good idea of how that made you feel personally.
If you are forced to pay taxes or somebody repossesses your home because you failed to pay taxes,
you get a pretty good idea of how that impacts you.
But triangular intervention is where there's a veil of ignorance,
where we don't really see and feel the impact of intervention in our daily lives.
And so this is the area where economists can be most enlightening to the general public.
It's only people who can see the unseen, in other words, that actually can enlighten their
and their fellow citizens with respect to what is the impact of this price control or
conversely what is causing a shortage of a particular good or service or what is causing
the price of a particular product going up.
Where are those causes?
Well, the normal, average, ordinary, everyday, common person doesn't have any way of figuring
to bring those things out and if you listen to the major media, they really don't have much of a clue either.
It's up to each and every one of us to be able to provide that kind of insight to our fellow citizens.
The first type of intervention is price controls, where you have, where the government sets either a minimum price,
such as a minimum wage or a maximum price such as a usury law setting an
upper limit on the interest rate and you can also have a fixed price of a
particular good you can have the state coming in and fixing all prices across
the board and so there's a variety of different types of price controls that
that the state imposes. Rothbard focuses on effective price controls, those where the price setting, minimums, maximums, or fixed prices are at odds with reality, with economic reality, and these cause distortions in the economy,
surpluses and shortages, they cause businesses to lose money, entrepreneurs to lose money,
and they lower welfare in the economy.
And of course, there's the general price control, which we see imposed by states in highly inflationary
economies and hyperinflationary economies with the idea to prevent inflation from impacting
economic performance and to prop up the purchasing power of money.
Of course this, the general price control actually causes a lot more chaos, a lot more
distortions and losses in the economy.
Money seems to lose an anchor to value, businesses lose money and entrepreneurs have a very difficult
One interesting thing that Rothbard does here with respect to price controls is that he brings in price controls on money.
So where normally you would find things like Gresham's Law, legal tender laws, and chapters on monetary economics and monetary policy,
Policy, Rothbard introduces them here in terms of price controls, so that he explains bimetalism
in Gresham's law where good money supposedly drives out bad money by categorizing bimetalism
where the state fixes the ratio of gold to silver as a form of price control.
Legal tender laws have a lot of different effects, but Rothbard focuses in on the impact
of legal tender laws on brand new coins versus worn out coins.
And finally, usury laws, which are often looked at in terms of price controls, where the state
imposes maximum interest rates in order to keep rates low, of course this prevents loans,
it prevents discourages savings and investment and ultimately leads to extra market activity
such as loan sharking, where individuals work outside of the normal market channels, they
They charge extremely high rates of interest because the normal rules of law in the marketplace
aren't in place with illegal activity, it introduces yet another form of violence.
So the violence of the state coming in and imposing its rule with respect to interest
rates also can result in violence from market participants rather than from the state itself.
So with respect to price controls, you have a situation where some people in the economy
are harmed and where very often some people can benefit.
Others are surprisingly harmed, so people who expect to benefit from certain price controls,
Say, for example, low-income people, there's a price control on milk.
Milk is in short supply, and the result being that people don't have access to milk at all.
So rather than helping them, it unintentionally or surprisingly hurts them.
Of course, there's all sorts of distortions caused by price controls, and this also leads
to taxes and bureaucracy as well.
So that also is going to fit in with the binary intervention, excuse me.
And also it's important to note that price controls can have effects on the product,
and product controls, which we're going to look at next, obviously can have impacts
The first kind of product control is prohibition. Here both the suppliers and the demanders are hurt by the prohibition, whereas in price controls you can have nominal winners either on the supply side or the demand side. With prohibition, you basically have all parties in the market harmed as a result of prohibition. The only people that are benefited are the bureaucrats and the interest groups.
groups that want to promote certain types of prohibition.
So an alcohol prohibition, for example, will help establish and fund an alcohol bureaucracy,
but it will also help politicians who are conveying favors to people who believe in
alcohol temperance and not drinking alcohol.
Of course, prohibition, it's the most important impact is in creating a black market where
there are more risks, there are higher prices and a lot of inefficiency.
And then Rothbard goes through and looks at all of the other impacts that prohibition
brings about.
It distorts the type of firm, it distorts and detracts the type of information that's
available to consumers. In fact, prohibition is an interesting contrast between neoclassical
economists and Austrian economists. Neoclassical economists are generally what they call price
theorists, so that everything they do with respect to modeling and markets and supply
and Supply and Demand has to do with the price of the product.
Austrians have a more general view of how government intervention affects marketplaces, businesses and consumers.
And when we look at prohibition, where you have the state imposing its will and enforcing it with criminal penalties,
What we find is that the changes in the market that result from a prohibition, the price changes are actually the least important in the overall scope of things.
So when neoclassicals look at the problem of prohibition, they try to model it in terms of price.
It raises the price for them, it decreases the quantity, and so therefore it in some sense achieves its desired result.
It doesn't achieve complete prohibition, but at least it reduces consumption.
Now the Austrians are going to look at that and say, well, you know, look at what other changes are happening.
The product is produced in an entirely different way.
It's transported under completely different conditions.
It's sold under completely different conditions.
And it's consumed under completely different conditions.
People don't have access to the rule of law.
People aren't protected by laws against fraud.
They aren't protected by the normal channels of competition.
One of the things that I've shown is that prohibition results in much higher potent drugs being sold into the marketplace.
So that the neoclassicals can say, well, we've decreased the quantity of drugs sold by prohibition.
The problem is, is that the quantity that's been sold is many times more potent than that which would have been sold in the marketplace.
So before prohibition, things like cocaine and heroin, morphine were relatively safe, and very few people died from those products.
they very few people overdosed from those products because they were produced and distributed and consumed under market conditions but now we have a completely different situation where the products are being produced, they're being distributed and they're being consumed under completely different conditions and a lot of people die a lot of people experience overdoses and all of that is directly
attributable to the prohibition itself. There was just a little news item on CNN on my way
over here which showed that the potency of marijuana is higher now than it ever has been
in the history of man, basically. And it's been consistently higher over the last 30
years that the government has been testing the potency of marijuana, which might be some
some kind of explanation for their behavior over recent years as well.
Now there's a whole long list of different types of product controls that grant monopoly
privileges in the economy and again Rothbard shows here that consumers and would-be or
where potential producers are harmed as a result of these product controls and that
very often these product controls and grants of monopoly privilege result in higher prices
for consumers and he also points out, which is very important, that many of these monopoly
privileges are sugar-coated with grants of appearing to serve the public interest in
in order to make them more palatable to consumers, and again, these are areas where it's very
difficult for consumers to understand what's happening to them, especially given this sugar
coating that the monopoly privileges are meant to improve the public image.
He starts out with compulsory cartels.
Next is licenses and certificates of needs.
Of course, there's many, many different professions such as doctors who are given licenses.
Certificates of needs apply to things like establishing new hospitals, new nursing homes,
things of that nature.
These all serve to increase the price of the product.
Standards of Quality, this obviously is cloaked in the public interest.
The medical profession is important with this regard.
The imposition of product definitions and ingredient labeling are all done to establish
so-called standards of quality.
including one that just came about recently where the government required food products
to label the amount of a certain type of fat, trans fats, well it turns out that at the
same time they required anybody who had trans fats in their food to label it, they also
also allowed producers to include up to one gram per serving of trans fats and declare
that there was no trans fats in the food, while at the same time allowing the producers
to change the amount that fit with a unit of consumption.
So a product will, you know, a bag of potato chips will say this has four servings of potato
chips and it's, you know, so many chips and so many calories and all that.
They allowed them to change that so that producers would reduce the amount in a serving, increase
the number of servings so that on the product labeling the calories per serving went down
and the amount of trans fats would fall below the one gram per serving.
So instead of sending out the message that we're going to get tough on trans fats, what
they effectively did was give a avenue for producers, and I'm all for trans fats, by
the way, I'm not, you know, being anti-trans fat here, to declare on their product that
This product is trans-fat free.
So you've seen a plethora of these new labeling techniques
when in fact, the product is the same old thing
that it's always been, the labeling has been changed.
And so, you know, this is not a fraud,
it's just a way in which industry has captured the state
to its own advantage in order to hurt consumers.
And, of course, so much for building construction regulations with the construction towers in
New York, you know, falling on a regular basis and killing people, as Walter would point
out, you know, that type of activity is severely restricted in a true free market economy.
Because these construction companies have complied with regulations and inspections,
they're able to get off with lower penalties.
Tariffs obviously is an important one where it's a battle basically between mercantilist
arguments and free market arguments.
Immigration restrictions, Rothbard shows how the free society works in terms of immigration
and Wage Rate Compensation Differentials, where capital moves from high wage to low wage countries
and where low wage workers move to high wage countries or high capital countries, which
basically, if we didn't have the national borders and have the distortions that we currently
have, things like population problems, labor shortages, and the like, would not emerge
at all. Child labor laws cause unemployment, less production. Conscription is another big
one, especially at the time that Rothbard was writing this, during the Vietnam or pre-Vietnam
era, post-World War II, the minimum wage law is a good example where the minimum wage
law actually hurts those that it is designed to help, subsidies to unemployment, penalties
to market forms.
That was a bigger issue in the 1950s and the 1960s than it is today, but we still see things
State of Maryland passed a law with regard to how firms would handle health insurance for the employees and it turned out that that law only applied to one Super Walmart in the state of Maryland.
Anti-trust laws fit into this, again, where it's seemingly designed to help competition,
it actually hurts competition.
Conservation laws, Murray goes into great depth with conservation laws, of course we
refer to them as environmental laws today.
The greatest pie in the sky type of legislation that is in the market today.
Environmental laws or conservation laws, Rothbard shows, is a misuse of resources in an economic
sense.
He shows that owners of private property create the maximum present value of their resources
is an earn the best place to conserve those resources.
And one thing that I find very enlightening
in terms of teaching classes about conservation
or environmental laws is to ask students
the difference between renewable resources
and non-renewable resources.
In other words, resources which the world has the ability
to produce over and over, we can change,
we can get less of them, we can get more of them,
But all we have to do is continue the production process of providing enough ground or enough food or enough air or whatever
and we'll be able to constantly reproduce those particular resources forever.
And then there's the non-renewable resources where there's a fixed finite amount of those particular products on Earth
and once we use them up, they're going to be gone forever.
And then I asked the students, which one of these sets of resources, the renewable or the non-renewable, do we face the most problem with?
And they inevitably pick the non-renewable resources, those which are finite, they're fixed.
If we use them up, it's all gone.
But the renewable ones, we shouldn't have much problem with.
But in fact, it's the renewable resources which we're having the most problems with according to the environmentalist groups themselves.
A particular plant species, particular animal species, particular fish species.
Whereas things like gold, for example, doesn't look like we're having much of a problem with that.
Even things like uranium, which has a sort of a shelf life to it, you know, that stuff is stored and then reprocessed into other products.
And so we're actually having very little problems with these exhaustible resources and we're having all of the problems with the inexhaustible resources that are renewable.
And why is that?
Well, with the non-renewable resources, they tend to be in private hands.
They tend to be owned by individuals, people who own land, people who own mines and mine resources.
Whereas with the renewable resources, those are things that are not subject to property rights very often,
or where the government actually gets in the way of establishing property rights like in
the sea or in bodies of water.
And so that's a great example of how the market with property rights actually takes
very good care of resources whereas where the government either has gotten in the way
of or has stymied the establishment of property rights.
Now patents are an important invasion of property rights by the state.
It's an invasion of the property rights of the would-be inventors, people who come along
and discover, are the second discoverers of various techniques.
I think the group basically understands a lot about the impact of patents, although I know
there are questions about it.
I want to give you a couple of personal experiences with inventions.
I suffer from allergies, pollen allergies, and one weekend this spring I woke up and
Now I thought I had this great idea that if I could only come up with a nose filter where
I could stick it in my nose and have a, you know, one of those high quality filters put
in there, that I could go outside instead of wearing one of those big Michael Jackson
masks, which, you know, it makes people afraid of you. But, you know, just a little nose
This plug, I figured, well, they'll just think I'm a geek.
And so I designed this thing and got, you know, what I would need to have, you know,
little plastic pieces and filters and so on.
And I thought, well, the filters would have to be replaceable given that it's in your
nose all the time.
And so I laid all this out and then I went on the Internet to see if anybody else had
discovered this.
What is he trying to do? Why would he be coming up with this kind of invention?
Well, it turns out that three other people already have patents on this, and then there's
a couple more who have patents pending, but none of them are in the marketplace. Those
people came up with this idea and they're just in the way, sort of, of other people
trying to bring it to market, because if I brought it to market, they would sue to recoup
And because there's multiple patents already existing, if anybody did try to bring it to market with permission, they probably have to get permission and give fees to all of the patent owners.
I also came up with another invention, again, for the allergies, where I took a 3M filtrate
filter. If you have an air conditioning unit in your home or in your apartment, there's
a filter attached to it. And if you don't have one, I'll show it to you. They're all
all around the institute, and so I took the 3M filter and duct taped it to a 20 inch box
fan and then you just run the fan and it brings the air through and it takes all the pollen
out of the air.
And so not wanting to profit from this myself, I sent the idea to the 3M company who also
also makes the masks and the filtrate filters, so that was the natural company to send it to.
And sure enough, about 18 months later, they came out with a very fancy version of my Thornton Air machine.
And I was kind of indignant that the first time I found out about this was when they sent me an advertisement
to buy one of these things costing two hundred dollars and you know I was going
to write this company and call them up and give them a piece of my mind but
somebody said somebody told me they said if they had even sent you a letter of
thanks that would have been evidence that I could have presented in a court
lawsuit against them in order to you know make my patent claim on that
and Product. So patents really affect, distort and reduce overall product research and in
particular they prevent the bringing of that basic research, that primary introductory
type research into the market in terms of products actually reaching the market. And
There's a whole host of other such interventions that Rothbard covers, and that's another
good benefit of power and market, or the final sections of Man Economy and State, is that
you get a shorthand introduction to all of the really important aspects of the problem.
You might not go into a lot of the details, but it'll say the consumers are hurt, would-be
Producers are hurt, special interest groups are helped, and so there's government franchises
like the post office and the state lottery, the problem of eminent domain, which really
probably cries out for an Austrian treatment, sort of a law and economics dissertation or
thesis on that subject, bribery, anti-monopoly policy, which of course Rothbard shows anti-monopoly
Policy is actually helps create monopoly and restrictive prices.
And then the appendix look at private coinage and coercion.
Again some very interesting topics.
And before opening it up I want to try to address or at least introduce some of the
written questions here.
By the way, when I started getting into Austrian economics, I had a couple of books.
I know I had Kirzner's book on competition, but one of the first books I ever got was
Power and Market.
And that was one I most completely read and digested of the early books on Austrian economics,
but I had no idea that there was this whole huge prelude of Man, Economy, and State for
So I read, I had some economic courses, some introductory economic courses, but I was basically
taking a lot of what Rothbard said either on tuition or faith, but it was a great eye-opener
for me.
I know that the classification of types of intervention and complex analysis is great
and Rothbard, but just a short question, what is his original contribution in this area?
Well, I think one is the topology itself, is laying out the system, the classifications,
and giving you the full feel of the entire scope of intervention and the vast different
and the varieties of intervention that the state makes in economy.
So I'd say that was the primary contribution, but a lot of these specific interventions
are not treated anywhere else in the literature as of the time that it was first published.
Second question, I'm not convinced by Rothbard's argument that the major purpose of standard
of Quality and Safety Regulations is to restrict competition and of course that's exactly
what the state wants people to think and that's the specific aspect of quality and safety
regulations that are most promoted by the state.
But we should note that in the market economy that there are a lot of very reasonable and
and in fact, more effective forms of safety and quality regulations.
There's some specific ones like the certification process.
Doctors need to be licensed, but other medical professions and other professions, other services
can be certified.
so that you're a certified whatever.
And that just says that you've been specifically trained in a service, that you've met all
the qualifications, you've had all the teaching, all the hands-on experience.
And so that's a very legitimate alternative to the licensing process.
And actually, licensing is somewhat suspect with respect to standards of quality.
For example, in terms of beauticians and people who cut hair and that sort of thing, the actual
requirements to get a license are not really heavily slated towards the cutting of hair
and those sorts of things.
are actually related to things that are not directly related to the business of cutting
and styling hair.
But they do form a barrier to entry because they keep people out of the profession.
People for example who don't have a great proficiency with the English language won't
pass the licensing test.
There are various seals of approval, the good housekeeping seal of approval, the National
National Association of Retired People, passed their seal of approval over a variety of products
specifically designed for their members. There's groups like Underwriters Laboratory. You very
often see electronic products in your apartments with a U and an L with a circle around it.
That means that the electronic components of this product have been inspected and certified
by the underwriters laboratory.
And then, of course, there's a whole bunch of market competitive forces which keep businesses
providing safe and high-quality products.
I also do not agree with Rothbard's dismissal of national borders as something warranting
special attention.
For instance, to name one difference, domestic borders and national borders usually differ
in that the latter involves language barriers. Furthermore, I believe that if people believe
that there is such a thing as a nation, then this will affect their actions and thus it
is worthy of attention. I find that Rothbard tends to oversimplify this matter too much.
Well, I would say that in this chapter, with respect to this chapter, he's downplaying
the role of national borders to explain some theoretical elements of these issues, such
as the immigration problem, such as the tariff, the problems with tariffs.
But I don't think that Rothbard would dismiss the issue of national borders in general at all.
On page 1098, do quality standards actually prohibit change or merely make it more costly?
If the government prohibits the sale of computers with less than two gigs of RAM,
Any new technology for computer memory would have to be in addition to the old RAM technology, but it would still be possible, correct?
Well, it certainly would be possible, but there also could be various types of drawbacks to such a quality standard, in this case, setting a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM.
For example, there are a lot of people who are interested in buying very low-priced computers.
As a matter of fact, there's a whole movement to provide every child in the world with the low-priced computers.
Whether or not they have access to the internet or electricity or anything like that is beside the point.
They just want low-cost computers in everybody's hands.
But this type of requirement would actually hinder that potential, greatly hinder it.
For example, two gig memory chips are already in high demand, but the smaller chips are
in less demand and so you can actually acquire them and construct lower price computers.
It might also, such technological regulation might also curtail the ability of the computer
making industry to switch from one technology to another.
If Rothbard would have had, excuse me, if Rothbard would have land to be free for the
taking by those who mix their labor with the land, how was it that the subsidy to grant
Right-of-Ways to Railroads isn't the policy of reserving timberlands from the market more
of a burden on others who must pay the restrictivist price than a subsidy to railroads, at least
with respect to the right-of-way as opposed to the lands reserved on the sides of the
way.
Well, I think Rothbard in particular would be against the subsidy, the giveaway of rights
on both sides of the 15 miles, on both sides of the right-of-way, the intercontinental
railroads were a giant scam, a big waste of resources, and that other ways, homesteading
ways could have very easily sufficed. I mean, if a railroad sent out a survey crew and put
down survey markers along a particular route, that would have established their property
Rights to the entire route from the Midwest over to the West Coast.
So I think that homesteading would have fulfilled that need with good ease and that the way
we did it ended up causing a very inefficient building of the railroads and a fairly big
waste of resources.
And we can come back to all these questions if you want.
To what extent are graphical representation, in this case the price controls, logically
sound?
The reasoning underlying them certainly is, but can a supply and demand curve be said
to prove anything about price controls?
That is, prove anything in the sense that logical argumentation does.
In other words, are graphical representations ectodictically or only tautologically true?
Well, in my own view, graphs with supply and demand curves are simply a way of conveying
information, a pedagogy, a pedagogical device, rather than anything that's predictably certain
or tautologically true.
They're just an easier way than trying to actually draw out individual supply and demand
Curves, and adding up the entire market and coming up with something less than a smooth
line.
You may have some disagreements on that one.
And then finally, what are some examples of more recent, in the past 10 years or 20 years,
of triangular intervention?
Well, you know, a lot of the triangular interventions are things that already exist, but if we go
back to 20 or 30 years, we have a variety of different things.
I imagine we could pass around some paper and pen here and come up with 100 or so.
There's the No Child Left Behind legislation within the last five or six years, the ethanol
subsidy program, the American with Disability Act, which is about 20 years old, the Prescription
Drug Act, major legislation increasing the power of the Federal Emergency Management
Association, there's the Patriot Act, there's cap and trade, the Kyoto Protocol, which the United States hasn't signed, but certainly could be studied, and just a large variety of environmental and business regulation type of interventions that have been introduced, and then of course, Austrians also like to focus in on aspects of deregulation and privatization.
which also would come under the rubric of triangular intervention. So there's a
there's really a whole host of different types of triangular intervention and
many new ones. The second part of this question is why can't sound economic
analysis prevail in showing the contradictory and harmful effects of
government intervention into the marketplace? Well I think it can and I
And I think it does. The real problem is in conveying that to the general population at large.