This piece by Don Boudreaux puts central election-cycle planning into perspective as well as anything I’ve read thus far. Here’s a snippet:
Who cares about tomorrow? Who cares about the counterfactual that is prevented from coming into existence? It will always be a mere counterfactual. We have no time for economic policies that allow market forces to play out over time – to play out in all of their rockiness, with their failure-to-keep-everyone-optimally satisfied-at-every-moment. We have no time to worry ourselves about the microeconomic structure of production, the pattern of relative prices. Changes for the better in those things take time. Better that we simply treat with greater government spending the symptom – a symptom, sometimes, of real problems and, at other times, merely of beneficial on-going economic changes – than to be patient and let market processes work their way out over time.
If you only have time today, this week, this month, or this year to read one blog post, read this one!