Smoke If You Want, and Pay for It by Sheldon Richman May 1, 1997 Tobacco has become a four-letter word. The cigarette companies are getting it from all sides. The federal Food and Drug Administration wants to regulate tobacco as a drug. State governments are suing to recover Medicare money spent on elderly people with tobacco-related illnesses. Heirs of long-time ...
Washington: Scandalized and Loving It by Sheldon Richman April 2, 1997 Here's the key to understanding Washington: it loves scandal. That's not the official line, of course. Scandal is portrayed as tragedy. Everyone wrings his hands, lamenting the time wasted investigating wrongdoing and the lost opportunities for reform. On cue, someone will always say that scandal mongering is politically motivated and that "the voters did ...
A Vision of a Free Society, Part 3 by Jacob G. Hornberger April 1, 1997 Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 Karl Marx wrote that the value of an item is determined by how much labor goes into producing it. A diamond is valuable because of all the work that goes into mining it. Therefore, Marx argued, since value is created by the ...
Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 4: Benjamin Anderson and the False Goal of Price-Level Stabilization by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 1997 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 Nature of the Welfare State by Sheldon Richman April 1, 1997 Welfare-state programs have three central characteristics: plunder, deception, and obfuscation. Because those programs always effect a forcible transfer of wealth from one group of individuals to another, they involve what the great 19th-century economist Frederic Bastiat called "legalized plunder." The law sanctions stealing in these cases and is thereby changed from its original purpose, which was to protect people's ...
Mandatory Volunteerism: If Orwell Were Alive, He’d Die of Laughter by Sheldon Richman April 1, 1997 President Clinton has endorsed one of most ridiculous ideas to come down the pike in some time: community service as part of the school curriculum. Is there a single idea packed with so many fallacies? I don't think so. Where to begin? In getting ready for a national service ...
Police Brutality: A License to Maul by James Bovard April 1, 1997 The Founding Fathers sought to create a "government of laws, not of men." A key principle of this doctrine is that no person is above the law — that every government employee must obey the same laws that government imposes on private citizens. Unfortunately, when it comes to police brutality, ...
April 15: Day of Infamy by Sheldon Richman April 1, 1997 April 15 is here again. For many people the day heralds a tax refund. But what are they celebrating? That they loaned the government money interest-free in 1996? Why is it that if the government doesn't withhold enough tax, you may owe interest, but if the government ...
FDR: A Fitting Memorial? by Sheldon Richman April 1, 1997 With a new memorial about to be dedicated to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, perhaps no one wants to step back and take an objective look at the man. But when even President Clinton declares the era of big government over, maybe the time is right. All children hear the words "FDR ...
Cutting Taxes Is Selfish by Sheldon Richman April 1, 1997 All right! Finally some basic talk about taxes. How refreshing! Inspiring my utterly sincere glee is a remark by Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers last week. He criticized people who want to cut the estate tax for being selfish. Ouch! That hurt. And the Republicans quickly responded. ...
The Penalty of Surrender, Part 1 by Leonard Read April 1, 1997 Part 1 | Part 2 These remarks, hardly more than a personal confession of faith, have their origin in an attitude or behavior commonly referred to as "compromising." The compromising attitude is exalted by many and deplored by only a few. As an example of the way this attitude is exalted, a certain business leader, perhaps the most publicized one in ...
Book Review: Critique of Interventionism by Richard M. Ebeling April 1, 1997 Critique of Interventionism by Ludwig von Mises, revised edition (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: The Foundation for Economic Education, 1996) 122 pages; $12.95. In the first decade of the 1800s, the French classical-liberal economist Jean-Baptiste Say summarized in his book Treatise on Political Economy what became the general view of the majority of political economists throughout the early and middle decades of the ...