Books
April 8, 2009 – 11:41 pm by JohnWhen I leave my career in science research to produce something useful for the world, I want writing to be at the center of my professional endeavors (and still a major hobby as well). Analyzing policy, or economics, or science, or something else for some think tank, media outlet, biotech or pharmaceutical company, or some other company is along the lines I’m thinking of. Getting paid to write for an online and/or print publication would be ideal, but even if I couldn’t be described as a professional “writer” I would still continue writing up a storm on my website(s).
But, the purpose of this post is to reflect on some ideas for books I’d like to publish. I am really good at coming up with premises for books, but I don’t know how well I can fill the gaps in between the covers with something substantive, unique, and salable. However, I am quite confident that with my passion for libertarianism, my enjoyment of almost every kind of writing, and the various types of training and experience I’ve picked up over the years, I can excel at it.
Anyway, some of the books I really want to write would be titled:
Science and the State
Health Care and the State
Health Care in America
Economic Equilibrium
The Market Always Wins
The last two would obviously be more about general economic theory and policy than medicine or science (which are closer to my current area of expertise), but I think with a lot of good advice and a few years of work, the latter could turn out pretty well. Economic Equilibrium would be all about how markets use the price system to adjust to new situations quickly, efficiently, and justly, and stabilize the general financial/economic situation. They reduce volatility to a great extent. Kind of like a pH buffer in chemical or biological systems: markets adjust and respond to every input in a sensible, predictable way that promotes stability and benefits the entire economy in the long run. Of course, a major theme throughout the book, with every lesson and every example, would be how government interventions that seek to undermine, alter, ignore, circumvent, or outright abrogate the workings of the free market will fail and will only distort the healthful adjusting and equilibrating of the market system. Further, the ways in which the economy adjusts to the government interventions can, almost axiomatically, only cause the opposite of the intended result.
Along those lines, The Market Always Wins would have the same thesis as my recent post The eternal truth of market principles, viz., the principles that govern human action cannot be adjusted or suppressed, and will always act on everyone and everything in the economy, regardless of how free the economy is. These principles explain why all State action fails, why certain State interventions fail in certain ways, and why State endeavors to fix this or promote that can only fail. They fail not because they prevent markets from working, but because the principles of the free market always apply to everything, even the State, and always act in opposition to State coercion. There is only the market, and there is only one set of economic truths, and these truths do not allow for coercive monopoly. If something is coercive, it is because the market doesn’t allow it, so even though the monopoly exists and the coercion is all too real, the principles of economics will not allow its schemes to work. The market opposes the State’s actions and the State opposes the market’s actions, but there is only one set of economic truths and they are constant and eternal. The market will always win. It might be next year, or it might be next decade, but it must win. It wins either with a black market, a recession, or a total political collapse. There are hundreds of good examples from the United States alone of how, after a time, the desires of the populace and the laws of the price system rendered futile the grand aims of the State and corrected its errors. I want to write an entire book applying these principles to dozens if not hundreds of specific State economic policies, directly linking cause (State interference) to effect (market rejection and correction of the perturbation). Hopefully this will help enlighten some people to the truth that the State can’t work because the market always works.
There is only one set of market principles, and they might apply a little differently in different cultures, but these differences are all part of the constant and eternal truths of economics, whatever those might be and however well we might understand them (naturally, I think the Austro-libertarians understand them the best, though their theory is doubtless flawed in some ways).
