Progressives Believe in Money Magic by Sheldon Richman April 2, 2013 It’s hard to believe that in the 21st century, educated people believe the government can produce real wealth by creating money. It’s especially ironic that the main preachers of this superstition fancy themselves progressives and are the first to accuse their opponents of being against science. What could be more antiscience than the alchemic proposal to create wealth ...
Living Economics (video) by Peter J. Boettke April 2, 2013 The Future of Freedom Foundation is pleased to present "Living Economics," a talk by Peter J. Boettke with comments from FFF vice president Sheldon Richman and Chris Coyne, F.A. Harper Professor of Economics at George Mason University. This panel took place on March 27, 2013 at George Mason University at Arlington in Founder's ...
The Libertarian Angle: April 1, 2013 by Future of Freedom Foundation April 1, 2013 The Libertarian Angle features FFF vice president Sheldon Richman and president Jacob Hornberger. The Libertarian Angle airs weekly.
Golden State Gun Grab Lays Groundwork for Mass Disarmament by Michael Tennant April 1, 2013 A recent news story demonstrates the dangers of letting the government know who owns guns and determine who is permitted to own them. The state of California “requires most weapons sales go through a licensed dealer and be reported,” writes Bloomberg, and it sends agents around to confiscate weapons from people the state has decided are unfit ...
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 ...
TGIF: Loving Economics by Sheldon Richman March 29, 2013 “My love affair with economics began in the fall of 1979.” With those words, Peter Boettke begins his valentine to the economics discipline, that is, his latest book: Living Economics: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Independent Institute and Universidad Francisco Marroquin, 2012). Boettke, besides being a University Professor of Economics and Philosophy at George Mason University, the BB&T Professor ...