At The Austrian Economists web log, Steve Horwitz has generated a lively discussion about what the most damaging economic fallacies of fact and of theory are.

In Clayton, CA two young girls’ fruit stand was shut down by local police on account of violating the town’s zoning laws. Tim Kane offers a thoughtful response to the incident: “The larger tragedy for those who care about economic prosperity is this case exemplifies a loss of America’s entrpreneurial culture. The younger a person learns the ‘hard lessons’ of real life, the stronger the odds are that they will become an entrepreneur and create jobs. When the bureaucratic impulse overwhelms the entrepreneurial impulse, meaning that a majority of the people thinks some kind of orderly system should be (or is!) in place to give everybody a job, then a [society] begins its great and subtle collapse.”