Dishonest Money - Economics in One Lesson

This is one of those books that I wish I would have read years ago.

Even if you don't know anything about "economics," I believe you will take priceless insights away from this short and well-written book. A quick look at some of the contents will give you an idea of what's in store.

The Broken Window (click link for a quick video overview) & The Blessings of destruction: These two explain what SHOULD BE common sense; that we cannot destroy our way to prosperity.
Public Works: "There is no more persistent and influential faith in the world today than the faith in government spending."
Taxes Discourage Production: "A certain amount of taxes is of course indispensable to carry on essential government functions...But the larger the percentage of the national income taken by taxes the greater the deterrent to private production and employment."

Credit Diverts Production: "...government can give no financial help to business that it does not first or finally take from business."
The "Curse" of Machinery: The author sarcastically asks: "Why should freight be carried from Chicago to New York by railroad when we could employ enormously more men, for example, to carry it all on their backs?"
Spread-The-Work Schemes: "The spread-the-work schemes, in brief, rest on the same sort of illusion that we have been considering. The people who support such schemes think only of the employment they might provide for particular persons or groups; they do not stop to consider what their whole effect would be on everybody."
Disbanding Troops and Bureaucrats: "When your money is taken by a thief, you get nothing in return. When your money is taken through taxes to support needless bureaucrats, precisely the same situation exists."
The Fetish of Full Employment: "Nothing is easier to achieve than full employment, once it is divorced from the goal of full production and taken as an end in itself...The slave labor in Germany had full employment. Prisons and chain gangs have full employment. Coercion can always provide full employment."
Who's "Protected" by Tariffs?: "It makes the industries in which we are comparatively inefficient larger, and the industries in which we are comparatively efficient smaller."
The Drive for Exports: "Exceeded only by the pathological dread of imports that affects all nations is a pathological yearning for exports."
"Parity" Prices: "Special interests...present a plan in their favor; and it seems at first so absurd that disinterested writers do not trouble to expose it. ...When at last disinterested writers recognize that the danger of the scheme's enactment is real, they are usually too late."
Saving the "X" Industry: "In order that new industries may grow...it is usually necessary that some old industries should be allowed to shrink or die....If we had tried to keep the horse-and-buggy trade artificially alive we would have slowed down the growth of the automobile industry and all the trades dependent on it."
How the Price System Works: "How is the problem of alternative applications of labor and capital, to meet thousands of different needs and wants,...solved? It is solved through the price system. It is solved through the constantly changing interrelationships of costs of production, prices and profits."
"Stabilizing" Commodities: "To give farmers money for restricting production, or to give them the same amount of money for an artificially restricted production, is no different from forcing consumers or taxpayers to pay people for doing nothing at all."
Government Price-Fixing: "...we cannot hold the price of any commodity below its market level without in time bringing about two consequences. The first is to increase the demand for that commodity...The second is to reduce the supply of that commodity...But in addition to this, production of that commodity is discouraged. (Price fixing reduces the availability of) ...the very commodities...regulators most want to keep in abundant supply."
What Rent Control Does: "The long run effect of this...device...is the exact opposite of what its advocates intend....the builders and owners of the more needed low-rent housing are discouraged and penalized. (They) ...are left with no incentive (or even capital) to build more low-rent housing."
Minimum Wage Laws: "We cannot distribute more wealth than is created. We cannot in the long run pay labor as a whole more than it produces...Real wages come out of production, not out of government decrees.