Regulation Policy & Welfare

A Lesson in the (Re)distribution of Wealth

by Edmund Contoski January 1, 2010

Through the company where I worked more than 35 years ago, I had an opportunity to meet an unusual man. I had not seen him since, but his recent obituary caught my eye. His name was Wayne Field, a name I’m sure few, if any, of you will recognize. In his 87 years he accomplished a great deal. He founded ...

Welfare Corruption in the New Deal

by Jim Powell September 1, 2009

How likely is it that a big government-spending program — Obama’s or anybody else’s — won’t be manipulated by politicians pursuing their special interests? In two of his recent New York Times columns, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman claimed that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was free from corruption. Consequently, he thought it was likely that Obama, too, can have an ...

It Can Happen Here

by Scott McPherson August 11, 2009

You think you’ve private lives Think nothing of the kind There is no true escape I’m watching all the time I’m made of metal My circuits gleam I am perpetual I keep the country clean... — Judas Priest, “Electric Eye” England’s Daily Express reported on August 4 that “thousands of the worst families in England are to be put in ‘sin bins’ in ...

Cash for Clunkers

by David Dorn August 5, 2009

As I was standing in a long line at the Post Office in Scottsdale, Arizona, at about 4:30 p.m., I said just loud enough for those around me to hear, “If you like this, wait until National Health Insurance.” There were some chuckles. But what I was really thinking about in ...

Robbery and the Welfare State

by George Leef July 1, 2009

Stealing from Each Other: How the Welfare State Robs Americans of Money and Spirit by Edgar K. Browning (Praeger, 2008); 226 pages. In the Sherlock Holmes story “Silver Blaze,” the key to Holmes’s solution of the case rested on something that didn’t happen — the dog that didn’t bark in ...

Not another Runaway Entitlement Program

by Jim Powell May 27, 2009

We have had more than seven decades of experience with entitlement programs, since Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the first big one in 1935. Now Barack Obama is pushing another big entitlement program — government-run health care. We don’t need to rely on his promises, since we can reflect on our ...

Why Do We Need the SEC?

by Jim Powell May 19, 2009

FDR established the Securities & Exchange Commission to protect people in securities markets. Yet there already were plenty of laws against theft and fraud, crimes that are seldom exposed by government regulators. Consider the succession of big Wall Street scandals since the late 1990s. It’s hard to find a single case ...

Socialism’s “Fatal Conceit”

by Ralph R. Reiland February 25, 2009

The appeal of socialism, wrote Nobel-winning economist F. A. Hayek, “depends on the instinctual appeal of promised consequences.” The problem, argued Hayek, is that “socialism cannot possibly do what it promises.” Socialism fails, unavoidably, because it is based on the flawed concept, the “fatal conceit,” that one man or one group, ...

The Socialist Bailout of Wall Street, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger January 1, 2009

Part 1 | Part 2 During the recent presidential race, Republican John McCain accused Democrat Barack Obama of being a socialist, owing to Obama’s belief in using the federal government to “spread the wealth.” Obama, for his part, expressed surprise at being accused of being a socialist. Apparently, he’s always believed that he’s a strong supporter of America’s “free-enterprise” ...

Madoff Scandal Exposes Government Failure

by Sheldon Richman December 24, 2008

The common reaction to the Bernard Madoff $50 billion financial scam was wholly expected. As Los Angeles Times columnist Tim Rutten wrote, “The lesson is one that becomes clearer with each excruciating turn of the Wall Street screw. The long, bipartisan experiment with financial deregulation has failed utterly. The ...

The Bailout State

by Sheldon Richman December 15, 2008

Ours is the Age of the Bailout. Bailing out failing companies is not new, but today the scale is unprecedented and the opposition is scant. The government today is committed to more than $7trillion in various forms of stock purchases, loans, and guarantees. The Treasury secretary has been given awesome discretionary power to buy bad securities or shares in ...

The Socialist Bailout of Wall Street, Part 1

by Jacob G. Hornberger December 1, 2008

Part 1 | Part 2 The massive federal bailout of U.S. financial firms reflects everything that’s wrong with the economic system of welfare and interventionism under which the United States has operated since at least the 1930s. There are critically important lessons in the bailout that the American people ignore at their peril. While most politicians and mainstream pundits ...