Saifedean Ammous: «A president thinks five years; a king, much longer term »

– How would you explain to a ruler to control the price of housing only produces scarcity?

– The temptation of many people in economics is to think things in terms of the mathematical concepts of a statistics office. What I try to do with this book is to think about the economy in terms of human action. One way to do so is to say that how houses are expensive, we will approve a law to be cheap. If you adopt the perspective of human action, you realize that when you enter this type of laws, what you are saying is that it is illegal to sell or rent a house at a certain price. But that does not magically change the cost of production of the house or rent it. The result is that if you cannot sell or rent at that price, the owner withdraws the house from the market and you end up having less offer. If you see it through human action, you realize that there are actions that are counterproductive.

– In our society it is well understood that people want to have a house or a salary, but it is not so easy to understand that an entrepreneur wants to obtain a gain when he develops a project. Because?

– What Mises calls the anti -capitalist mentality, in which people think of benefit and capitalism as something negative. This is extremely dangerous as a mentality, because the important thing that people get benefits is not that they can become rich, but have found a way to provide a value that exceeds the costs that lead to produce. That means they are creating value for society and the more profitable you are, the more value you are creating.

– Dedicate a chapter to energy. What is your vision of the energy transition?

– Our whole modern life depends on hydrocarbons and I use the marginal analysis of the Austrian school to explain why I think there is no possibility that solar and wind energy will significantly replace fossil fuels. We need high energy power that is available on demand regardless of the weather, when people need it. And the only way to do it is with fossil fuels, nuclear energy and perhaps hydroelectric. So these five energies that I have mentioned will be the main sources for everyone.

– Do you deny the impact of emissions or simply believe that the solution is technological?

– I don’t think there is anything that suggests that emissions are causing a crisis. They may have an impact on the climate, but it is probably insignificant compared to natural evolution. We know that the world is warmer than hundreds of years ago, but we also know that in Greenland and in the Arctic there are fossils of trees that grew thousands of years ago. So the earth has gone from being colder to being much warmer in the last thousands of years without our emissions contributing to it. I don’t think they contribute enough to affect the weather. It is not even far comparable to the human catastrophe that we would have if we get rid of the useful and reliable sources of energy and power that we use.

– People who have read their manual consider that the way in which it refers to Marx as “a vague German semi -scope” does not correspond to an academic author.

– If we remove the bias of a century of fiduciary inflation promoting Marxist ideas throughout the world to justify more public spending and inflation, this would be a fair assessment. He was not someone who could pay his own bills in life, and that is reflected in his immature work. His ideas are wrong, poorly thought and direct consequence of the resulting delusions of not having been a productive human being. This is not a passenger insult, but is in the essence of the failure of Marxist ideas about economics. If Marx had managed to stay successfully in the market, he would have better understood the importance of capital and private property. Instead, he inspired millions of people to believe in the deception that their failure, their laziness and envy are justification to attack others.

– You say that trade leads to a civilized existence. The Germans believed that and now they have realized that trade does not guarantee that Putin does not appear.

– I think the market does bring civilization. The peoples of Russia and Germany benefited from the fact that they traded with each other and was a good thing. And it is the government that brings destruction. It was a government that ordered the Nord Stream 2. It was a government that began the war in Ukraine. The vast majority of people want to live and work to give their children a better future. But small minorities that are in the government and the groups that benefit from their policies have destructive interests: they take the money and resources of the people and direct them towards destruction instead of production. If we had a way to restrict government spending we could better protect our civilization.

– What do you think when an archetype of the entrepreneur like Elon Musk enters the US government?

– I am not sure that Elon Musk is a hero of the private initiative. Many of their businesses depend on the government that is the main client of their companies. Tesla sells mainly because of the subsidies that the government gives to electric cars. Receive huge subsidies. That is what made his company grow over the years. Spacex receives important amounts from NASA. I think that a huge part of your business depends on contracts with the government, and I don’t like that. I prefer that the government not interfere with those sectors. I don’t think cars must be subsidized. The market must produce the cars that people want. I don’t even think the government should participate in space exploration.

– Donald Trump is interested in the dollar remains the global currency. Do you think it is possible that Bitcoin replaces the dollar?

– Yes, Bitcoin is superior to the dollar because it is a strong currency. Nobody has the ability to create more bitcoin, but they are always manufacturing more and more dollars, and therefore the offer of dollars always increases and its value decreases. People will benefit if they change money that is not easily created. Therefore, it is likely that the value of that money will continue to increase and become increasingly important in the monetary system.

– Some people say that capitalism today does not face the challenge of the anti -priest left, but from the mercantilism of the populist right. What do you think?

– There is something really in that. Ultimately, it is not so much from the left with the right, but about the State against the individual. That is why it is quite common for right -wing parties to have a more individualistic rhetoric, but in practice it can happen that they end up having more statist and aggressive policies against individual rights. And I think this is seen in particular in terms of its foreign policy and military expenditure. They arrive at the elections talking about what they want to reduce public spending and the power of the government. And focus on aspects that the left greatly increased public spending and government intervention. And they manage to reduce it, but increase the expense to finance foreign wars. And people and resources send to fight in foreign wars, which is obviously a huge abuse of the authority of the State.

– Is there also nationalism and protectionism?

– Also. So this notion that the mere fact of declaring rights means being in favor of freedom, is not correct. The Chinese government says communist, but charges much lower taxes than most countries in Europe and North America. And China enjoys economic freedom that in many ways no longer exists in the rest of the world: less taxes are paid, there is no inflation and the government does not spend in foreign wars. China is not invading countries like the United States threatens, so the traditional dichotomy of which left means state and right means market, it is not precise.

– You consider the monarchy as a family business. And he likes monarchies. What does the Spanish think?

-The monarchy has helped Spain preserve much of its culture over time and protected it from many of the bad influences that statist imposed in other countries. If you compare with France, who lost its monarchy 200 years ago, you can feel that in Spain there is more sense of the country as a society, of the country as a family, there is a sense of identity and common culture. I think a real family helps preserve something like that, and I think that in a place like France you see that it is missing. In my country, Jordan, the king has done, I would say, a great job keeping the country safe and in peace during the last 100 years, while around him, all republics have had many wars. Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq have suffered death and destruction in the last century, while Jordan has lived in peace.

– There are those who would say that what mentions is anecdotal.

– You don’t have to belittle it. Kings think of a very long term perspective and want to keep peace because they run a family business. They intend to maintain the country in good shape for their child and for their grandson, while in the nations where there are presidents, they remain in power for a few years, and have incentives for things to go well for a few months or a few years. In a hundred years of a republic we have twenty presidents and each of them is optimizing their five years of mandate, so you have a hundred years of short -term decisions. While if you have a family for a hundred years, they are constantly thinking about long -term improvement.