The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized

How Regulations Affect Our Everyday Lives

By (author) Per L. Bylund

Not available to order

Publication date:

03 August 2016

Length of book:

192 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9780739194584

This book illuminates the real effects of regulations on people’s everyday lives. It traces the effects of regulations on an economy by working through the ripple effects of changes. In so doing, the book provides a fundamental understanding for the economy as an organism rather than a machine, and enlightens the reader by offering a model for understanding the economy and market. Regulations, which are restrictions placed on the working of the economy, have consequences, both intended and unintended, direct and indirect. While the direct effects are well understood, the indirect effects are often overlooked because they don’t fit with the machine understanding of an economy. More to the point, this book emphasizes the real effects of regulation and market change on individual actors, thereby stressing how the economy works to provide an individual with the options that exist in choice situations. We draft a new definition of prosperity and well-being which focuses on the individual’s access to valuable alternatives. From this point of view, the real implications of regulation are traced step by step, following the logic of exchange and the effects on individual actors rather than the economy as a whole.

Chapter 1 The How of the Market
Chapter 2 The Price is Right
Chapter 3 What Prices Communicate
Chapter 4 Unbeatable, Imperfect Markets
Chapter 5 The Seen and the Unseen
Chapter 6 The Market and Natural Disasters
Chapter 7 Taxation and Regulation
Chapter 8 Attempts to Perfect the Market
Chapter 9 The Unrealized
Chapter 10 Implications for our View of Society

Per Bylund’s The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized is a well-reasoned and written exposition of how regulations in the economy have deleterious effects on our everyday lives. It takes the reader through basic economic reasoning to telling examples and in the process makes the very important point about reorienting our perspective on exchange, production, and wealth creation as an ongoing process that is always in progress. Today's so-called inefficiencies are tomorrow's profit opportunities for those entrepreneurs that act upon them and release new ways to release the mutual gains from trade. Regulations thwart this ongoing and ceaseless progress. Entrepreneurship, on the other hand, is the prime mover of progress and improvements in the material conditions of man. A great read, highly recommended.