Bill Fleckenstein: The Dow's dangerous winning streak: The market's recent performance mirrors the strong runs that led up to the crashes of the Nikkei in 1989 and the Dow in 1929. Coincidence? Or warning?While elite bashing can provide some relief, nothing will change as long as we do not question everything we take for granted. According to Bryan Caplan, whose book is sold on the Princeton.edu website, the greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters.
... voters continually elect politicians who either share their biases or else pretend to, resulting in bad policies winning again and again by popular demand. Boldly calling into question our most basic assumptions about American politics, Caplan contends that democracy fails precisely because it does what voters want. Through an analysis of Americans' voting behavior and opinions on a range of economic issues, he makes the convincing case that noneconomists suffer from four prevailing biases: they underestimate the wisdom of the market mechanism, distrust foreigners, undervalue the benefits of conserving labor, and pessimistically believe the economy is going from bad to worse. Caplan lays out several bold ways to make democratic government work better--for example, urging economic educators to focus on correcting popular misconceptions and recommending that democracies do less and let markets take up the slack.
Man is an intelligent creature whose ability to reason depends on his environment entirely. In this respect, it is true that we're all interconnected. Thus living as a Man implies a choice: that of behaving like a human or worst... a monster of destruction.
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