Mais uma aula de Economia do grande Thomas Sowell:
"I first became aware of the law of gravity as a small child when I pedalled by tricycle off the porch and crashed into the yard. Gravity was of course operating all along, whether I was aware of it or not.
Economics is a lot like that. Many people who are completely unaware of economics sometimes discover it the same way I discovered gravity, through some personal or national crash.
Liberals especially tend to think up all sorts of good things we want - a 'living wage,' 'affordable housing,' 'universal health care,' and an ever-expanding wish-list of things that everyone should receive as "rights" - with little or no awareness of the economic repercussions of turning that wish list into laws."
(...)
"Prices are perhaps the most misunderstood thing in economics. Whenever prices are 'too high' - whether these are prices of medicines or of gasoline or all sorts of other things - many people think the answer is for the government to force those prices down.
It so happens there is a history of price controls and their consequences in countries around the world, going back literally thousands of years. But most people who advocate price controls are as unaware of, and uninterested in, that history as I was in the law of gravity.
Prices are not just arbitrary numbers plucked out of the air or numbers dependent on whether sellers are 'greedy' or not. In the competition of the marketplace, prices are signals that convey underlying realities about relative scarcities and relative costs of production.
Those underlying realities are not changed in the slightest by price controls. You might as well try to deal with someone's fever by putting the thermometer in cold water to lower the reading."
