Economics

Government Can’t Stimulate an Economy

by Sheldon Richman December 29, 2011

Barack Obama won’t use the “stimulus” label to describe the nearly half-trillion-dollar jobs bill he sent to Congress in September, 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. Somehow a package about half that size ...

Price Discrimination Is Fair and Just

by Laurence M. Vance November 29, 2011

While on a recent cross-country flight, I looked around at the 200 or so other passengers on the plane and thought, not about the snacks we would be served (pretzels), the movie we would be shown (Rise of the Planet of the Apes), or whether the babies on the flight would cry the whole way (they did), but about ...

Liberty and the State: A Virginia Political Economy Perspective (video)

by Charles K. Rowley November 7, 2011

Charles K. Rowley is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and General Director of The Locke Institute in Fairfax, Virginia. Editor (Joint) of Public Choice since May 1990. Member of the Mont Pelerin Society. Listed in Mark Blaug's Who's Who in Economics (since 1986). Honorary Lifetime President of The European Public Choice Society. Founding Editor of ...

Opponents of Occupy Wall Street Harm the Cause of Freedom

by Sheldon Richman November 4, 2011

After many weeks, Occupy Wall Street and its kindred demonstrations around the country are still a source of headline controversy — even aside from the police manhandling of protesters. And yet the disparate coalition of discontent with contemporary America has not coalesced around a single set of aims. Unfortunately, the loudest voices call for more government management of the ...

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 ...