Daily Articles

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 ...

A Vision of a Free Society, Part 2

by Jacob G. Hornberger March 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 What would a free society look like? That is, what if everyone were free to live his life the way he wanted, so long as his conduct was peaceful, and free to enter into any mutually beneficial exchanges with anyone in the ...

Why Does the Fed Set Rates, Anyway?

by Sheldon Richman March 1, 1997

"Fed Boosts Benchmark Interest Rate" Every now and again we read a headline like that in the nation's newspapers. And just last week, the Federal Reserve raised a key interest rate a quarter point to prevent, so it says, the reappearance of inflation. Here's the reasoning: consumer demand is ...

Monetary Central Planning and the State, Part 3: The Federal Reserve and Price Level Stabilization in the 1920s

by Richard M. Ebeling March 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 FTC Strikes Again

by Sheldon Richman March 1, 1997

The Federal Trade Commission has once again dealt a blow to our allegedly free enterprise economy. The FTC plans to move against a proposed merger between Staples and Office Depot, two office supply chains. The commission claims the merger would violate the antitrust laws. Displaying its standard confusion over ...

Order without Design

by Sheldon Richman March 1, 1997

Perhaps the toughest thing that libertarians have to persuade nonlibertarians of is the existence of order that is undesigned. It is certainly a counterintuitive idea. So much of our everyday experience seems to teach us that where there is order, there is a designer working from a plan. That fact ...

Stop the Flood of Taxpayer Money

by Sheldon Richman March 1, 1997

Once again spring is heralded by swollen rivers in the Midwest. The overflowing Ohio River and its tributaries have caused heartbreak and millions of dollars of damage in several states in the region. And once again a colossal public-policy blunder is being committed: the handing out of millions of taxpayer dollars in ...

Destroying Families for the Glory of the Drug War, Part 2

by James Bovard March 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 In Clyo, Georgia, 11-year-old Tony Johnson met police Sergeant Sam O'Dwyer during Tony's DARE training. After completing his training, Tony met with O'Dwyer three times and eventually informed the cop of a few marijuana plants on a corner of his parents' land near their trailer home. O'Dwyer busted Tony's mother on April 9, 1992. ...

Four Cheers for Capitalism

by Sheldon Richman March 1, 1997

Is capitalism morally wanting? A lot of people think so--and not just the Clintons. Conservatives, of both the neo and paleo variety, seem uncomfortable with what they call "unbridled" capitalism. Recently William Bennett, the former drug and education czar, launched an attack on it in announcing a new project. ...

The Individual in Society, Part 2

by Ludwig von Mises March 1, 1997

Part 1 | Part 2 Liberty and freedom are terms employed for the description of the social conditions of the individual members of a market society in which the power of the indispensable hegemonic bond, the state, is curbed lest the operation of the market be endangered. In a totalitarian system there is nothing to which the attribute "free" ...