Market musings

I was celebrating my grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary with a stint in Vancouver, Canada, and a cruise of the Alaskan coastline.

As I am prone to do when in cities, I walked around downtown Vancouver every night I was there. I was astonished at how many homeless people lived there. Every time I turned a corner it seemed like I saw a couple more homeless people. I have been to NYC and Chicago and I noticed homeless people there, but nothing nearly on the scale of this phenomenon in British Columbia. Austin has a significant homeless population as well, but even our numbers were dwarfed. Some cities become havens for homeless people, who move from city to city, exploring the various agencies that will feed and clothe them. Then I found a clue:



If you can't make it out, the title on the door reads "The Ministry of Employment and Economic Assistance." Vancouver seems just as interested in Orwellian terms as is our own government, with our own latest hits including the PATRIOT Act and the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. I also thought the anteroom looked like something out of Kafka's parable, Vor dem Gesetz.

It would be a mistake to assume that I oppose the results of government assistance organizations. I do question, however, that assumption that the government is doing the best job of helping homeless people out, and if in fact it is not hurting job opportunities for individuals. These sorts of bureaucratic organizations are stopgaps at best, and there are only so many stopgaps that a government can afford (even when it's taxing its taxpayers through the eyes).

Lew Rockwell wrote a nice article about the first month of liberty, a thirty-day transition to a free market economy. Check it out here.

I am gearing up for graduate courses which start Wednesday. I won't be taking any Modern European courses, but I have purchased a few books on the Weimar Republic at a professor's recommendation. We all know that this welfare state crumbled under the weight of the oppressive Treaty of Versailles; but it should be interesting to explore some of the other economic areas as well. I just bought von Mises' Human Action, Socialism, and The Anti-Capitalist Mentality, so it should be nice to read them in conjunction.

I might be more active on the blog as school gets going and the gears get turning; frankly I'm suprised I managed to post after a 10 day vacation . . . from vacation. I'm taking a course on Demonology and Witchcraft (seriously, and I just started reading the Harry Potter series), so hopefully you'll pick up some musings on that as well.