Understatement in Atlas Shrugged
Atlas Shrugged: "He enjoyed the sight of a prosperous street; not more than every fourth one of the stores was out of business, its windows dark and empty."
Today: "A new report released Thursday from the Real Estate Board of New York outlines how 30% of 311 storefronts in retail areas around Midtown East and Grand Central are vacant, which is more than double the historical rate. The report also said Madison Avenue had a retail vacancy rate of 28% among 289 stores."
Today: "A new report released Thursday from the Real Estate Board of New York outlines how 30% of 311 storefronts in retail areas around Midtown East and Grand Central are vacant, which is more than double the historical rate. The report also said Madison Avenue had a retail vacancy rate of 28% among 289 stores."
The article begs a question- What should government do about it?
The answer is, as usual, nothing.
If there is a long term movement away from storefront retail, the market will adjust, slow or fast, fair or not, but always better than government actions.
If it a short term thing due to government induced panic about wuhu, the market will adjust to whatever destructive policies government apply.
There is a complication, when governments are engaging in one crackpot and destructive move in on-going monthly succession, then markets cannot respond in any sensible manner. Even so any government response to its own foolishness will never solve any problem.
We see this all the time, there is a problem, clamor for government to act, they do, injustice and inefficiency are created elsewhere in the economy, more government corrections are brought in, one mess after another, all tricky to unwind.
The answer to a problem created by government is not to bring in additional corrections but remove the cause.
Exceptions- yes, in those areas which are the proper preserve of government such as law enforcement, courts, fire fighting.. A cynic could argue that governments do badly on these as well.
John Galt himself gave the best answer:
"GET OUT OF THE WAY"
Government is corrupt. Government is the tool of the enemies of freedom.
Given that the government is usually made up of the people who would not be able to get the job they hold in the private sector; it is not surprising that they choose the worst of the available options.
They are products of their environment, and that environment is ever-unchanging. It’s the stagnant swamp that does nothing. It doesn’t matter if you pull 1,000 gallons of water out and replace it with 1,000 gallons of clean tap water; that new water is such a small amount that it is instantly tainted.
You could replace all the water in it all at once, and within a month the water would be back to where it was because the bed of the swamp itself is the source of the fetid corruption.
It’s why replacing Biden won’t fix the problems we have now, just as replacing Wesley Mouch wouldn’t fix the problems in the Atlas world. Fall guy joe is just there to take the vitriol of the ideas they have all come up with, his own generationally terrible ideas included. The support staff is part of it, the lobbyists are part of it, and it’s the people you’ve never heard of who have the greatest power over everyone else.
The only thing we can be thankful for is that the people in government are there because they are incapable of truly ingenious thought. If they were capable, they would have come up with far, far worse options and implemented them with great fanfare.
Only insane bailouts by the fed have kept the mall owners (and the banks who made the loans) from going to a well deserved bankruptcy hell.
Atlas Shrugged, Now Non-Fiction.