So then, what of the California healthcare initiative? All Californians have to do instead of sitting in front of their computer, furiously commenting and growing fat, is to take a stroll through the lovely public parks, exercise a bit, chat with friends and eat healthy foods. Before long, the health insurance bill will fall to a million dollars just in case someone turns up at an empty hospital for a band-aid or two.

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Do you remember the gas lines and gas shortages of the 1970's? You may not as you are a Canadian. I don't know of you guys had them up there. All of that in the US was caused by Richard Nixon imposing price controls and production controls on the petroleum industry. Then he made it worse by saying gas stations had to stay open whether they had gas available to sell or not. This imposed big time hardships on gas station owners as they had to pay their employees whether they had any product to sell or not. Meaning that they had ongoing labor costs even when they had zero sales. Gas stations only make a few pennies per gallon profit. The rest of the money goes to the state, federal government and the oil companies. So, when they had to pay their employees to sit on their behinds because there was nothing to sell it ran a bunch of them out of business.

The entire shortage of those days was only 4%. Meaning of course, that 96% of the gasoline normally available was still there. If Nixon had let well enough alone the prices would have gone up some, and people who were driving just to be driving would have curtailed their driving just because of the cost. Instead he imposed price restrictions--profit restrictions if you will--and the rest of the people who had to have gas to get back and forth to work, or needed their vehicles for work itself, would have had enough gas use and the lines would not have existed. And the rise in profits would have caused the oil companies to increase production enough to meet the demand. Then the price would have gone back down to normal and the whole thing would have been over and no real big disruption would have occurred. None of that could happen however because Nixon imposed controls on prices and production. His actions created, worsened, and prolonged the situation. This is what always happens when wage and price controls are put in place, and what you are proposing is nothing more than price controls.

If you like I can give many more examples of how artificial shortages have come about in countries across the world by the governments in those countries interfering with the laws of supply and demand. The reason most people don't see the relationship between government rules and regulations and economic problems is that they don't understand economics, and that allows politicians a free hand to do whatever they like and their constituents not realizing just how much harm they are doing while all the time the politicians are patting themselves on the back and saying, see, look at what we are doing for you. We are helping you out of this problem.

If we go back to the great depression of the 1930's the economic machinations of FDR caused that depression to last years longer than it should have. There was a very similar market crash during the administration Warren G. Harding. He, however, did nothing. He didn't interfere with the economy in any way, and no one ever talks about that event because he didn't. Because he didn't the market took care of the problem in no time at all and there was no real depression. Everyone talks about the market crash of 1929 and the great depression because FDR thought he was far smarter than the market and the more he interfered with the economy the worse the depression became, and the longer it lasted. He was the cause of an unbelievable amount of poverty and the length of the depression. Under Harding the market rebounded in a few months and the money supply took care of itself. Under FDR none of that happened because he didn't allow it to happen. It is a great economic lesson for today but you rarely hear about it because it is very politically unpopular to talk about it. The politicians hate the example because it shows how little they understand the cause and effect relationships of economics because almost all them have been indoctrinated into the school of Keynesian economics. Plus the socialists in this country have so deified FDR that it is just plain old heresy to say he did anything wrong. But, if he was so great, why did the country call a constitutional convention after his death and make it against the law for any president to serve more than 2 terms in office? It tells me that people realized back then just how much harm he did in his four terms in office and wanted to limit the harm to the country by any one man and his ideas.

Regulation is the bane of economic prosperity. It drains money out the economy without the average person being able to see it. This is why Trump is rolling back government regulation of business right and left. In doing so he is injecting life back into the economy.

Just before before Obama left office he put a massive amount of regulations in place. The cost of those regulations is in the trillions of dollars per year in what they drain out of the economy. They cause poverty. Almost everyone knows how slowly and how little the US has come back from the crash of 2008. The reason is because Obama put in place 20 or 30 times as many regulations as FDR did, and FDR was the major cause of the Great Depression. What Obama did to hide the effects of what he has done was to monetize out debt. His "quantitative easing"(qe) was nothing more than printing money out of thin air and then pushing it into the stock market to artificially increase stock prices because that is what the average person and politician looks at. He pushed $80 billion a month into the stock market through his qe over the term of his presidency. Almost all by itself it is the cause of a lot of issues.

There is a lot of hidden inflation in the US. In the food industry the manufacturers have kept their prices the same but decreased the size of the containers. Cottage cheese used to come in quart containers: 32 ounces. Now it comes in 24 oz containers. That's an increase of 25% in price. Potato chips used to come in 2 lb bags. Now they come in 1 lb or smaller bags. That's an increase of 50% in price. I can give you many more examples but that illustrates the issues involved. What the government does in figuring their inflation numbers ignores the fact that the amounts sold per container are smaller and chooses only to look at the price. Thus the government says, look at how little inflation there is, when the reality is far, far different.

Getting back to Trump you see the socialists screaming about how much harm he is doing. But that is all a smoke screen. He is doing right by the country so far. He isn't perfect by far, but he is doing far more for it than any President that we have had in many a decade. But the left is screaming because he is reducing their power by reducing spending and regulation. They absolutely hate him for it and the news media that is no longer unbiased, but the propaganda arm of the Democrats, is screaming right along with them. That said, I didn't vote for Trump. I didn't trust him as he has for decades been a Democrat. But I have to give him credit for keeping his campaign promises and starting to drain the swamp of all the corruption at the highest levels of government. All the media hysteria you see is the entrenched forces of corruption fighting him on it.

Gary K, you are a classic Austrian. And that's ok. I am one who believes a lot of these shortages are forced on the people from the globalists trying to convince the population supply and demand works as they say it does.

I guess you think supply and demand will cause inflation if there is too much cash in an economy?

It is true the depression of 1920-21 was short because nothing was done. I don't believe it had anything to do with any market pressures.

IMHO

Blessings Gary K,

Managed capitalism is just that! You let the markets run their course until they start to fail. At this time the government steps in to right the economy to prevent recessions and depressions.

Keynes had the right basic idea, but, for some reason never thought to address the credit side, or debt side of the equation.

You bet I subscribe to the Austrian economic theories of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. They make sense. When they explain things, they explain them in common sense terms and show why what they believe is true. There are other non-Austrian economists who agree with them that do not claim to be from the Austrian school of thought. I've read on this subject extensively and the Austrian school of thought makes more sense than any of the others.

You really ought to read the book on Keynes about who he was. It is documented using his own words as to his behavior and beliefs. It is titled, Keynes: The Man, and is a free download from Mises.org. It will shake your belief in his writings pretty soundly as it shows just how devious and self-serving the man was. And studying the writings of Hayek and von Mises will show just how wrong Keynes was on everything. Neither Hayek nor von Mises were Christians, but in some of Hayek's writings can be seen Biblical principle after Biblical principle.

"General Theory" is really nothing more than a complete scam as Keynes pulled numbers out of thin air, used very flawed mathematics, and many of his ideas are nothing more than ideas such as mercantilism, which had already been refuted in his day, repackaged in greatly obfuscated language. He claimed he refuted Say's law but all he really refuted was a straw man he created that masqueraded as Say's law, and it is really easy to defeat straw men you yourself create.

Keynes wasn't actually an economist either. He only took one class on economics in his entire life. He was just like me in his economic education: self-taught.

I'd like to see your evidence that globalist interference in the market is done to falsely show that the market when left alone works. Start another thread if you'd like. I think this would be an interesting discussion as I believe just the opposite--they interfere for a couple of reasons but not the one you believe to be true--and can show it in real life case after case.

I have another question or two for you too. They may sound pretty odd coming from nowhere, but just humor me for now as the reasons for them will become apparent.

Who knows more about your financial needs, your likes and dislikes of the products available to you, and what you can afford to pay for those products? You, or someone who doesn't know you and has no knowledge of your individual financial situation?

Do I think supply and demand will cause inflation through an artificial insertion of currency into the system? No. I think the artificial insertion of excess currency causes the inflation. The more currency you have floating around that is not tied to actual production devalues the currency. Let's look at this in round numbers so that it is easy to see.

Let's say you have 10 lb's of gold. You also have 100,000 dollar bills whose value is based upon that 10 lbs of gold. That means each of those dollar bills is valued at .0001 lbs of gold. Now let's say you print off another 100,000 dollar bills. Now how much is each of those 200,000 dollar bills worth? They are now worth .00005 lbs of gold. That means the value of your currency was just now cut in half. That is inflation. Where did the inflation come from? The insertion of currency not based upon any real property of value.

Now let's turn this example completely around. You have 10 lbs of gold and the 100,000 dollar bills. What you do instead of printing more money is go and dig out another 10 lbs of gold. In other words, you increase your production. Now how much is the value of each of those dollars? The are worth twice what they were worth originally, .0002 lbs of gold. That means the purchasing power of those dollars just doubled. Anyone depending on them to buy and sell is now wealthier, where anyone who was depending of the 200,000 dollars valued on the 10 lbs of gold was poorer than before you printed out the new currency. To hold equal value they had to hold twice the number of dollars.

That is inflation based upon insertion of currency into an economic system without a corresponding increase in production in that same economy.

So then, production is the same as gold to you? Gold is in pretty short supply in the world and who decides what the value of that gold is? If we are going to use nominal GDP instead of gold, then that changes a lot of ideas of Mises and Hayek.

Also, what Biblical principles do you see in Hayek's ideas?

As far as managed capitalism is concerned, it has been used successfully in the world already! So, it is very real.