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RE: Rent-Seeking and Wealth Destruction
When I hear Wealth Destruction I always think of stock exchange commenters.
I always laugh when they says "billions of dollars where destroyed on the stock market".
After all, everyone has exactly the same as the day before. The same % of a company that still has the same assets.
Speculating on the price of an asset doesn't really destroy wealth though. Not to say the stock market isn't a mess dues to massive governmental intervention that can actually destroy wealth.
As is which case for example?
Where is a massive intervention?
Tax laws that disproportionately incentivize stock market investment, especially as a retirement program
Inflationary monetary policies
Artificial interest rate manipulation resulting in a boom/bust business cycle
Subsidies and bailouts
Protectionist regulations
need I go on?
OK
as intervention I understand stopping, not "boosting".
Government cannot boost the economy. None of the Keynesian prescriptions or excuses work as advertised.
Uh... the government is part of the economy. So by Definition it can change the economy. For good or bad.
And if something not works its the neoliberal theories like trickle down or austerity. I still have to see it work once after decades.
Keynesian measures (and effectively the same: war production) have worked several times in the past.
Government is not part of the economy by definition. There are two ways to gains wealth: Production and plunder. The former is the economic means of production and voluntary exchange. The latter is aggression against those who use the economic means, and includes the government. Plunder is the political means.
We are not advocating "trickle-down economics" or "austerity." We are advocating individual liberty and respect for just property rights. Those political schemes have nothing to do with the free market, and cannot fix the root problems of economic interventionism.
War does not create wealth. War is the biggest example of rent-seeking destruction known to mankind. Resources are diverted from serving the economy and into the most overt-possible destruction of wealth. Are you unfamiliar with the Broken Window Fallacy?