Daily Articles

Punishing Success

by Sheldon Richman May 1, 1998

Let's cut to the chase: It's Microsoft's property. The company should be free to offer it on any terms it wishes. If people don't want to buy Microsoft products, they don't have to. As long as no law keeps other people from offering competing products, no one need ...

FDR – The Man, the Leader, the Legacy, Part 2

by Ralph Raico May 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 Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, whom Franklin took as his wife ...

Book Review: J.B. Say

by Richard M. Ebeling May 1, 1998

J.B. Say: An Economist in Troubled Times writings translated and selected by R.R. Palmer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); 164 pages; $39.95. Whatever economic freedom we enjoy in the world today is due, to a great extent, to the ideas and efforts of the classical liberals and economists of the first half of the 19th century. Inspired by the ...

Who Is an Extremist?

by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 1998

Libertarians are often hit with the accusation "You are an extremist." What the accuser means is that the libertarian holds political and economic beliefs that are at the outermost fringes of American society. The term is customarily used in an insulting or derogatory sense. But isn't "extremist" a relative term? That is, doesn't being extreme depend, in large part, on ...

Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 16: Keynes and Keynesian Economics

by Richard M. Ebeling April 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 Price of Junk Science

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 1998

The Clinton administration knows how to add insult to injury. Not only is it committed to an environmental program that will interfere with individual liberty and sap the American economy of its vitality, it also refuses to level with the American people about the costs. At the global warming conference in Kyoto, Japan, the administration signed a treaty committing the ...

The Great Sugar Shaft

by James Bovard April 1, 1998

The U.S. government has devotedly jacked up American sugar prices far above world market prices since the close of the War of 1812. The sugar industry is one of America's oldest infant industries — yet it dodders with the same uncompetitiveness that it showed during the second term of James Madison. Few cases better illustrate how trade policy can ...

Forget the Trade Deficit!

by Sheldon Richman April 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. There's no such thing. Adam Smith, that Scot who knew a fair bit about political economy, said: "Nothing is more absurd than this doctrine of the ...

Bank Mergers and Progress

by Sheldon Richman April 1, 1998

The big hullabaloo about the latest bank mergers stems from a fundamental misconception about the way the world works. The unions of Citicorp and Travelers, NationsBank and BankAmerica, and Banc One Corp. and First Chicago have to be judged against the fact that we live in a world of uncertainty. ...

FDR – The Man, the Leader, the Legacy, Part 1

by Ralph Raico April 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 As we approach the end of the 20th century, ...

Book Review: The Logic of Action

by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 1998

The Logic of Action, Volume 1: Method, Money and the Austrian School by Murray N. Rothbard (Lyme, N.H.: Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc., 1997); 452 pages; $80. During the past 40 years, one of the most important contributors to the Austrian school of economics was Murray Newton Rothbard. He was also one of the major figures in the revival and renaissance ...

Loving the Children

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 1998

Love for the children is one of the favorite justifications that Democrats and Republicans use to maintain and expand government control over people's lives. Whenever libertarians propose ending the war on drugs, along with all of its terribly destructive consequences, a standard Democratic-Republican response is, "We have to maintain the war on drugs for the sake of the children." ...