Forget the Trade Deficit! by Sheldon Richman August 1, 1998 Memo to newspaper editors: Stop publishing stories about the trade deficit. You are needlessly worrying people about something that means absolutely nothing. Forget the trade deficit. Except in the most trivial sense, there's no such thing. Adam Smith, that Scotsman who knew a fair bit about political ...
Tariffs as Enemies of Freedom by James Bovard August 1, 1998 Some prominent protectionists, such as Pat Buchanan, are portraying high tariffs as an engine of national liberation — as a way to save Americans from foreign threats. However, tariffs always have been and always will be an enemy to individual freedom. The U.S. tariff code is the accumulated junk heap ...
FDR – The Man, the Leader, the Legacy, Part 4 by Ralph Raico August 1, 1998 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Table of Contents When the United States entered the First World War, ...
Restriction and Free Trade by Fredric Bastiat August 1, 1998 Two opposite doctrines oppose each other: The one, which is dominant in legislation and opinions, sees the way of progress in the surplus of sales over purchases, of exports over imports — in a word, what is called balance of trade. The other, which we try to propagate, is the exact ...
Book Review: Collected Works of Edwin Cannan by Richard M. Ebeling August 1, 1998 Collected Works of Edwin Cannan in 8 volumes, edited by Alan Ebenstein (London/New York: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1998); $900. In 1951, Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek wrote an essay entitled "The Transmission of the Ideals of Economic Freedom." He pointed out, "At the end of the First World War the spiritual tradition of liberalism was all but dead." But, Hayek ...
A Libertarian Visits Costa Rica by Jacob G. Hornberger July 1, 1998 Last spring, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation of Fairfax, Virginia, invited me to participate in two conferences in Costa Rica. One conference was to celebrate the inauguration of a new Costa Rican libertarian think tank named INLAP. The other was a conference of 1,000 international business people who were gathering to make free-market recommendations to the international negotiators of ...
Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 19: Savings, Investment, and Interest and Keynesian Economics by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 1998 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 ...
The Politics of Scandal by Sheldon Richman July 1, 1998 The hand-wringing over President Clinton's extracurricular activities is misplaced. Whatever else can be said about what Mr. Clinton did or didn't do, we can say this: it would be no tragedy if, as a result of the scandals, the presidency, indeed government itself, were diminished. Quite the contrary. Pundits and others have been heard to say that it is too ...
The Growing Farce of Fair Housing by James Bovard July 1, 1998 In his masterpiece The Totalitarian Temptation, French socialist Jean-Franois Revel wrote, "There is a growing trend in the West to discount freedom as compared to justice." This trend is clear from the type of moral arrogance that congressmen and bureaucrats show in suppressing freedom in ...
FDR – The Man, the Leader, the Legacy, Part 3 by Ralph Raico July 1, 1998 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Table of Contents Niccolò Machiavelli, the famous Renaissance political philosopher, had a ...
Book Review: Money and the Nation State by Richard M. Ebeling July 1, 1998 Money and the Nation State edited by Kevin Dowd and Richard H. Timberlake Jr. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1998); 453 pages; $24.95. For the entire 20th century, governments have fought a world war against gold as an international monetary standard. In its place, governments have imposed a system of monetary nationalism, with each government controlling and managing its own ...
Closed Minds on Open Borders, Part 2 by Jacob G. Hornberger June 1, 1998 Part 1 | Part 2 Did you ever think you would see the day when the United States government would be forcing people into communism? Thirty years ago, the U.S. government sent 50,000 American men, many of whom had been conscripted, to their deaths in Southeast Asia. The purported reason: "We don't want the South Vietnamese to have to ...