When Government has a monopoly of all production and all distribution, as many Governments have, it can not permit any economic activity that competes with it. This means that it can not permit any new use of productive energy, for the new always competes with the old and destroys it. Men who build railroads destroy stage coach lines.
Rose Wilder Lane, Discovery of Freedom (1943).
The pace of this election year is picking up. But what we are sure to gain faster isn’t what the candidates want.
Click on over to Townhall.com for this weekend’s dose of Common Sense. Then come back here for the extra dollops of information and opinion:
Progress . . . is to be measured by the accuracy of man’s knowledge of nature’s forces. If you examine this sentence carefully you will observe that I conceive progress as a sort of process of disillusion. Man gets ahead, in other words, by discarding the theory of to-day for the fact of to-morrow.
H. L. Mencken, in Robert Rives La Monte and Mencken, Men versus The Man (1910).
On the hundredth day of 1998, the Northern Ireland peace talks ended with an historic agreement, dubbed the Belfast, or Good Friday Agreement. The accord was reached after nearly two years of talks and 30 years of conflict.
Johan Norberg gives the concise case against the old hat leftist love for “Swedish Socialism”:
Look around YouTube and you will find more from Norberg about the reality behind the myths of Scandinavia.
I am a contributing creator of American civilization; it does not create me. I control the stem of this civilization that is within my reach; it does not control me. It can not even make me read Spengler, if I’d rather read a pulp magazine.
Rose Wilder Lane, Discovery of Freedom (1943).
Despite being outnumbered 16 to 1, forces of the Old Swiss Confederacy proved victorious over the Archduchy of Austria in the Battle of Näfels, April 9, 1388.
On this date in 1991, Georgia declared its independence from the Soviet Union.
Just when you thought it safe to go back into the loan market. . . .
Yes, you guessed it: a bubble may be about to pop.
There are actually several, but here’s one you might not expect: the automobile loan market.
Though less regulated and tampered with than the housing market, auto loans aren’t immune to “moral hazard” and other government-induced dangers. The Fed’s low interest rates are almost certainly stimulating the new car market. “Subprime” car loans are way up and so are delinquencies. Do the bankers making these decreasingly solvent loans expect a bailout?
As Eric Peters notes at his immensely fascinating automobile website, the average car loan is now $32,000, “a record high.” And then there’s the “ever-increasing duration of new cars loans. They are now on average six years long — and seven year loans are becoming pretty common.”
Why? “In order to spread out payments (now averaging almost $500 a month) that have become simply too much to manage for most people.”
But then of course car prices are rising. And not just because of simple inflation. It’s the result of government regulations, mandates, and . . . general craziness. Many buyers now finance used car purchases, too, as Mr. Peters explains. That used to be fairly uncommon. The used-car market has been unduly affected by government insanity as well. Remember Cash for Clunkers? Politicians boasted about their managed destruction of millions of used autos.
What they really achieved was a tighter-than-ever supply of usable older cars.
Cruising toward the auto-destruct of the auto-loan markets.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Just as the constant increase of entropy is the basic law of the universe, so it is the basic law of life to be ever more highly structured and to struggle against entropy.
Václav Havel, Open letter to Dr. Gustáv Husák, Communist President (April 8, 1975).
On April 8, 1913, the 17th amendment to the Constitution, providing for the popular election of U.S. senators, was ratified.