Who Killed Greece? by Anthony J. Papalas May 1, 2013 The Greek tragedy began in 1981 when PASOK, the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Party, won the national elections. Andreas Papandreou, who had been a member of the Greek Communist Party and had received his Ph.D. in economics at Harvard in 1942, founded and led PASOK. He had published significant scholarly works with a Keynesian slant and served as chairman of the ...
Food Safety: A Market Solution by Paul Schwennesen May 1, 2013 The FDA is trumpeting, with unseemly giddiness, sweeping implementation of new rules within the now thoroughly moldered food-safety bill, passed two long years ago. Like any dish served past its prime, this one smells a bit off. As a producer in the ascendant food renaissance (defined by a sudden respect for all things small and local) I’ve noticed a curious ...
Regulatory Herding, Regulatory Stampedes by Richard W. Fulmer May 1, 2013 Perfect storms occur when many factors align. Sandy was one of the most damaging hurricanes in the history of the United States, but it took the confluence of a number of elements to make it so. Under normal conditions the storm would have moved northeast, away from the U.S. coast. Instead, a high-pressure cold front forced Sandy to turn ...
Book Review: What Reality Teaches Us by Laurence M. Vance May 1, 2013 No, They Can’t: Why Government Fails — But Individuals Succeed by John Stossel (New York: Threshold Editions, 2012), 324 pages. John Stossel is the well-known host of Stossel on Fox Business. A graduate of Princeton, he has won an incredible 19 Emmy awards, is a five-time honoree for excellence in consumer reporting, and is a New York Times bestselling ...
Chile’s Gun-Control Lesson for Americans by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 2013 One of the popular arguments for gun control is that people don’t need assault rifles, high-capacity magazines, and certain types of high-powered pistols to shoot deer. That argument, however, ignores the primary rationale for the Second Amendment, which was to ensure that people retained the means to resist tyranny at the hands of the federal government. Statists give short shrift ...
James Buchanan’s Subjectivist Economics by Sheldon Richman April 1, 2013 James Buchanan, the Nobel laureate who died at 93 in January, was well known for his pioneering work in Public Choice (the application of economic principles to politics), constitutional economics (as a device for limiting government power), and many other key subjects in political economy. His voluminous work has long been of interest to libertarians and classical liberals for ...
Obama and His “Most Evident” Right: Equality by James Bovard April 1, 2013 In his second inaugural address, Barack Obama quoted the Declaration of Independence and hailed “the most evident of truths — that all of us are created equal.” Obama never explained why “created equal” was more evident than the right to liberty. He understands that he can capture far more power by invoking equality than he could by promising to ...
Why James Buchanan Matters for Those Who Love Freedom by Steven Horwitz April 1, 2013 On January 9 the world of political economy and the community of libertarian academics lost one of the 20th century’s most important thinkers with the death of James Buchanan at age 93. Although he was not as well known as Mises and Hayek, or even Milton Friedman or perhaps Robert Nozick, his work belongs with theirs in any discussion ...
Ten Reasons the U.S. Is No Longer the Land of the Free by Jonathan Turley April 1, 2013 While each new national-security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such ...
Macroeconomics as Coordination by Alexander William Salter April 1, 2013 If your main source of economic information is a newspaper, television news station, or government statistical bureau, you would probably say that macroeconomics is the discipline that studies a handful of aggregate data series, such as consumption, investment, government spending, and total income, for the purpose of understanding the causal relationships among them. The reason people pay attention to ...
Book Review: All in the Family: America’s Big Brother by Matthew Harwood April 1, 2013 Enemies: A History of the FBI by Tim Weiner (New York: Random House, 2012), 560 pages. Since its humble beginnings in 1908 with a pint-sized force of 34 special agents, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has always been the pillow over the face of the First Amendment. From its inception, the FBI was first and foremost an intelligence agency ...
Right-to-Work Laws and the Modern Classical-Liberal Tradition by Sheldon Richman March 1, 2013 It’s not widely known, but an earlier generation of libertarians condemned so-called right-to-work laws as anti-market. For example, Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom, compared right-to-work to anti-discrimination laws. Ayn Rand also opposed right-to-work laws. The Spring 1966 issue of the libertarian student-run journal New Individualist Review carried Prof. Hirschel Kasper’s article “What’s Wrong with Right-to-Work Laws.” NIR was ...