Visible Projects, Hidden Destruction by Ralph R. Reiland October 21, 2011 Today’s crop of central planners and big spending politicians could learn a thing or two about economics from Henry Hazlitt’s classic bestseller, Economics in One Lesson, published in 1946. Common sense doesn’t have an expiration date. “There is no more persistent and influential faith in the world today than faith in government spending,” Hazlitt wrote. “Everywhere government spending is presented ...
Market Failure: An Argument Both For and Against Government (video) by David Friedman October 19, 2011 On Ocotber 5, 2011, David Friedman gave the following speech at The Future of Freedom Foundations Economic Liberty Lecture Series. The speech can viewed below in its entirety. David Friedman is Professor of Law at Santa Clara University and the author of The Machinery of Freedom. He is a graduate of Harvard University and holds a Ph.D. in Physics ...
A Real Jobs Bill by Rich Schwartzman October 11, 2011 There is a jobs bill being bandied about in the U.S. Senate. As with most government-based plans, it’s political — with warm, fuzzy rhetoric that’s designed more to garner votes at the polls than to accomplish anything truly productive. The rhetoric, as is so often the case, is based on class warfare. Let’s soak the rich, taxing them to create ...
Wall Street Couldn’t Have Done It Alone by Sheldon Richman October 10, 2011 The spreading Occupy Wall Street movement, despite a vague worldview and agenda, properly senses that something is dreadfully wrong in America. The protesters vent their anger at the big financial institutions in New York’s money district (as well as other big cities) for the housing and financial bubble, the resulting Great Recession, the virtual nonrecovery, the threat of a ...
Game Theory and the Dark Side of Envy by Richard M. Ebeling October 1, 2011 Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory by Robert Leonard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, (2010); 390 pages. Economist Oskar Morgenstern is best known as the co-developer, with mathematician John von Neumann, of game theory. Game theory emerged out of curiosities about logic and strategies of games such as chess, where each player must take into consideration the ...
Ignorance Is Statist Bliss by Rich Schwartzman September 26, 2011 The more things change, the more they stay the same. I was with some friends (in the Delaware Libertarian Party) who were running an Operation Politically Homeless table during Newark Community Day in Delaware recently. An OPH consists of having people take The World’s Smallest Political Quiz, then plotting their position on the Nolan Chart. It’s been years since I manned ...
Social Security Is Not a Ponzi Scheme by Laurence M. Vance September 21, 2011 It is good to see that the Republican presidential candidates are battling it out over the nature of the Social Security system. It is something that few politicians have been willing to talk about, lest they antagonize the largest class of voters in the country — senior citizens. At the Republican candidate debate at the Reagan Library in ...
Rube Goldberg Economics by Rich Schwartzman September 16, 2011 “Since ‘economic growth’ is today’s great problem, and our present Administration is promising to ‘stimulate’ it — to achieve general prosperity by ever wider government controls, while spending an unproduced wealth ...” Any contemporary libertarian or Austrian-school economist could have written those words. The quotation, however, is from Ayn Rand’s opening paragraph to the essay “Let Us Alone,” published in ...
Stimulus II Won’t Work, Either by Sheldon Richman September 16, 2011 President Obama won’t use the “stimulus” label to describe his nearly half-trillion-dollar jobs bill, but that refusal can’t hide the fact that he has no idea how economies recover from recessions. “Stimulus” is a tainted label because his $800 billion bill in 2009 was a failure. His economic team promised that passing that bill would keep unemployment from exceeding ...
Obama’s War on Prosperity and Freedom by James Bovard September 12, 2011 On September 7, 2011, James Bovard gave the following speech at The Future of Freedom Foundations Economic Liberty Lecture Series. The speech can viewed below in its entirety. James Bovard is the author of nine books, including Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), The Bush Betrayal (2004), and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994). He has written for ...
Give Thanks to Price Gougers by Fergus Hodgson September 7, 2011 Some things never cease to amaze me, for example, the willingness of state officials to vilify and prosecute those who dare to raise prices during an emergency. As far as superficial demagoguery and economic illiteracy go, those initiatives are right up there. Thirty-one states have some form of anti-price-gouging law, and a recent statement from North ...
Is There a Right to Earn a Living? by George Leef September 3, 2011 The Right to Earn a Living: Economic Freedom and the Law by Timothy Sandefur (Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2010) Is there a right to earn a living? Most Americans would answer, “Of course there is, but ...” Following that “but” you would get a long list of exceptions and qualifications that whittle away at the right, such as “but ...