Suffering The Remedies

This Week’s Applied Hayek: NPR Slip-Up Edition | Power Line: "It has been well said that, while we used to suffer from social evils, we now suffer from the remedies for them.  The difference is that, while in former times the social evils were gradually disappearing with the growth of wealth, the remedies we have introduced are beginning to threaten the continuance of that growth of wealth on which all future improvement depends.

These last passages could have been written with the present Euro crisis, and America’s entitlement funding crisis, in mind.  The late economist Herbert Stein famously said, something that can’t go on forever, won’t.  My AEI colleague Alex Pollock (author of a fine short book on this whole matter, Boom & Bust) offers his own close corollary: Loans that can’t be paid back, won’t.  (See: Greece.)  To which I offer the Hayward Welfare State Codicil: Entitlement promises that can’t be kept, won’t."