I’ve had this in the back of my mind for weeks.  Then two events brought it to the forefront.  First, a customer wrote this wonderful comment in an order form;

Your lessons and videos in your Resource section WERE LIKE GOLD to me! I thought only I had questions that you answered there (i.e., how to attach plastic rail guards easily, can AKs shoot clay targets, what EXACTLY is the difference between stamped and milled (it is like EVERYBODY already is supposed to magically know this somehow!), difference between red dot and other sights, and so on). Seriously, I have tried to learn about AKs now for 2 years, most of my knowledge comes from Gabe Suarez (who strongly promotes Ultimak as you know) but you really filled in holes in my knowledge quickly on that one resource page. THANK YOU! Please keep teaching us, it builds amazing trust between us and you and we appreciate it!

It’s great to hear from customers, especially happy ones.  And I know the feeling.  When I was in High School I was expected to know things (event schedules and such) that were never told to me and were not posted, as if osmosis had been expected to work for knowledge transference.  “What do you mean you didn’t know about the meeting?  Everyone else knows!”

Now to the reason for my posting said “lessons and videos” on my web site.  I did it because I was tired of answering the same questions over and over, and explaining the same things in detail to people who just did not get it, plus I was frustrated with trying to sell a product that (it seemed) few people understood.  I spent some time putting that stuff on the web site as a labor-saving measure so I could spend more of my time being productive, and because the more people understand some of these products the more people will buy them.

But there is a much broader point to this.

Regular readers know that I’m a fan of Walter Williams’ writing.  He recently put up a nice bit entitled “Economic Miracle” describing much the same thing;

Adam Smith, the father of economics, captured the essence of this wonderful human cooperation when he said, “He (the businessman) generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. … He intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain.” Adam Smith continues, “He is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. … By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.” And later he adds, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”

To the customer, it may seem that our putting up a user resources page is an act of charity, or some other form of magnanimity (after all, it is free of charge).  It may in fact have that effect on people, but the bottom line is; this sort of thing happens millions of times per day, all around the world, all out of self-interest.

In a free market, we have to do a better job of serving the customer than those around us, or we fail to prosper.

Let government interests meddle with free markets and it all starts coming apart.  It happens a tiny bit here and a tiny bit there.  At first it may show up as a minor annoyance– maybe a slight price increase here or a drop in service over there.  Eventually it leads to higher risk, fewer start-up businesses, more failures, the formation of de facto monopolies through the process of government licensing or subsidies, people holding back on investments in capital improvements, etc.  You can rarely ever put your finger on it directly, and if you listen to politicians, things are going to be just fine as long as you keep them “in charge” of things.  Finally it leads to stagnation, lawlessness, and decay, as can be seen in parts of the U.S. and in other countries.

For those of you who voted for Obama; I’ll spell it out for you.  Capitalism works better than any of the alternatives.

Via US News:

President Obama’s senior intelligence adviser says that the world financial crisis has surpassed terrorism as the country’s “primary near-term security concern,” pointing to unrest in countries around the world as commerce stumbles. It was an unusual briefing by the new Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, who was briefing Congress on the U.S. intelligence community’s annual threat assessment, which in the past has usually focused heavily on issues like Iranian nuclear weapons and progress in the global effort against terrorist groups. “Time is probably our greatest threat,” Blair said. “The longer it takes for the recovery to begin, the greater the likelihood of serious damage to U.S. strategic interests.”

I wanted to write my essay on economics this weekend but I may have something that is a higher priority get in the way.

I’ll get to the economics eventually. It’s really, really important. Here and here are some short courses to get yourself up to speed.

Robert Higgs, senior fellow in political economy for The Independent Institute, gives us some of the history of how the socialists ran roughshod over the Constitution in the 30s:

Until the 1930s, the Constitution served as a major constraint on federal economic interventionism. The government’s powers were understood to be just as the framers intended: few and explicitly enumerated in our founding document and its amendments. Search the Constitution as long as you like, and you will find no specific authority conveyed for the government to spend money on global-warming research, urban mass transit, food stamps, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, or countless other items in the stimulus package and, even without it, in the regular federal budget.

This Constitutional constraint still operated as late as the 1930s, when federal courts issued some 1,600 injunctions to restrain officials from carrying out acts of Congress, and the Supreme Court overturned the New Deal‘s centerpieces, the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act, and other statutes. This judicial action outraged President Roosevelt, who fumed that “we have been relegated to the horse-and-buggy definition of interstate commerce.” Early in 1937, he responded with his court-packing plan.

Although Roosevelt lost this battle, he soon won the war. As the older, more conservative justices retired, the president replaced them with ardent New Dealers such as Hugo Black, Stanley Reed, Felix Frankfurter, and William O. Douglas. The newly constituted court proceeded between 1937 and 1941 to overturn its anti-New Deal rulings, abandoning its traditional, narrow view of interstate commerce and giving the federal government carte blanche to spend, tax, and regulate virtually without limit.

After World War II, the government enacted the Employment Act of 1946, codifying the government’s declared responsibility for managing the economy “to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power,” and it has actively intervened ever since, purportedly to attain these declared ends. Its shots have often misfired, however, and we have endured booms and busts, a decade of stagflation, bouts of rapid inflation, and stock-market crashes. The present recession may become the worst since the passage of the Employment Act.

I expect the socialists to complete their take-over and solidify an iron grip on us this time. As Newsweek said, We Are All Socialists Now. The court precedences set in the 30s essentially guaranteed it. The only way that I can see that has any potential to get us out of the abyss is to go deeper into it.