The New Central Planning Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4500 words - 1

The New Central Planning - Essay Example Pitched to a general audience, "The Federal Reserve and the Financial Crisis" is part of the chairman's praiseworthy effort to increase Fed transparency.  The first two lectures cover the origins and history of the Fed. Mr. Bernanke identifies three primary functions of central banks: to conduct monetary policy (i.e., controlling of the supply of money by setting interest rates); to serve as lenders of last resort (i.e., providing liquidity for important institutions to stave off financial crises); and to regulate the financial system (i.e., limiting the risks that banks and other players in financial markets may take). Yet he hardly discusses the quantity of money in circulation or the Feds effect on it. The omission reflects the fact that Mr. Bernanke has dramatically altered the nature of central banking. Under his management, the Fed now tries to determine to which sectors the economy's savings flow, and monetary policy has become solely about setting interest rates.  To his credit, Mr. Bernanke considers the merits of the classical gold standard, in which the dollar was fully redeemable for a specific quantity of gold. He believes that its gains in long-run price stability were more than counterbalanced by the short-run economic fluctuations it caused. But as University of Georgia economist George Selgin pointed out after the lectures were delivered, the chairmans argument against the gold standard suffers from some severe weaknesses. For starters, it ignores the path-breaking research of Christina Romer, former chairman of President Obamas Council of Economic Advisers, which demonstrated that the frequency and severity of recessions werent significantly greater before the Feds creation in 1913 than after World War II. This casts doubt on the ability of the Fed with its fiat money to tame the business cycle any better than did the gold standard without the Feds intrusions.

Individual freedon(see instruction below) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Individual freedon(see instruction below) - Essay Example l choice of a person but also to social safety because drug addicts tend to eventually demonstrate complete of partial defeat of consciousness that is often accompanied by physical degeneration and at the end leads to complete isolation and death. Very rarely (only in 5-10% of all cases) drug addicts manage to recover completely. The statistical data show that the results of rehabilitation programs throughout the world can hardly be called optimistic: around 90% of drug addicts who had been detoxified are back to taking drugs. When people who abuse substances become dependant on them, they are guided by the constant desire to take the drug, which sometimes causes them to commit crimes – and this certainly endangers the society. Drug addicts are usually subdivided into two categories: functional and non-functional, the first group being able to live a more or less normal social life sustaining their addiction for years: â€Å"Their lives are not made totally unmanageable by it so they dont tend to drop out of society.† (The long walk to freedom 2001) Psychologist Dan Wolf comes up with the following examples when talking about the functional drug addicts: â€Å"the housewife who cant relax without Valium, the ad executive who can’t keep up without his cocaine, or the friend who can’t socialize unless she has a drink or a joint in her hand.† (The long walk to freedom 2001) Non-functional addicts are people whose personalities and lives are partially or completely destroyed by the drug. Non-functional drug offenders pose the main danger to the society as they are very likely to become inadequate. Apart from being non-productive members of the society, they are likely to commit crimes, and even though legally they remain citizens of the state, in fact they only bring damage to the community they live in. Drug addiction is often called an â€Å"illness† of the entire society destroying it from within. Except from criminal threats, drug addicts very often suffer