Sitting in Raleigh reading a book sounds much less exciting than touring Bangkok (see above), but the many words of wisdom in the book inspired this note.
Locker Room readers will recall the Locke Foundation’s take on price controls. Regular readers will also recognize the name Thomas Sowell, frequently quoted in this forum. I’m now reading the new third edition of Sowell’s Basic Economics, which features the following observation about price controls:
Free-market prices are not merely arbitrary obstacles to getting what people want. Prices are symptoms of an underlying reality that is not nearly as susceptible to political manipulation as the prices are. Prices are like thermometer readings — and a patient with a fever is not going to be helped by plunging the thermometer into ice water to lower the reading. On the contrary, if we were to take the new readings seriously and imagine that the patient’s fever was over, the dangers would be even greater, now that the underlying reality was being ignored.
