Archive for David R. Henderson

David Henderson is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and an economics professor at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. He is editor of The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics (Liberty Fund) and blogs at econlib.org.

Henderson’s Iron Law of Government Intervention: The 1967 Detroit Riot

The more I have studied government policy over the last 40 or so years, the more strongly I have come to believe that whatever problem you name, some government intervention—a tax, a subsidy, a spending program, or a government regulation—was an important cause or, at a minimum, made the problem worse. The evidence for this [...]

26Oct2011 | David R. Henderson | 5 comments | Continued

The Right Amount of Manufacturing

Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, recently pointed out that in 2009 the U.S. economy had the world’s largest manufacturing sector. (The most recent data show that China’s sector edged out the United States because of our slow economic recovery.) Every year since 2004 U.S. manufacturing output, in constant 2005 dollars, [...]

22Jun2011 | David R. Henderson | 7 comments | Continued

War Is a Government Program

Libertarians and conservatives who argue for economic freedom and against government control tend to make both principled and practical arguments for their positions. Take health insurance, for example. The principled argument against government regulation of health insurance is twofold: (1) No government has the right to dictate to someone what kind of insurance he should [...]

23Mar2011 | David R. Henderson | 22 comments | Continued

The Conquest of the United States by Militant Islam

In 1898 William Graham Sumner, a famous libertarian sociology professor at Yale University, gave a speech titled, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.” You read that right. In the same year the U.S. government had attacked Spanish forces in Cuba and the Philippines, a case of conquest by the United States, Sumner claimed [...]

24Nov2010 | David R. Henderson | 15 comments | Continued

The Decline in Civil Liberties

On a flight from Chicago to Washington, D.C., in 1981, I sat beside a U.S. foreign service officer who had just finished a stint in Moscow. He told me that although he had enjoyed the job, he needed to get his family back to America because he wanted his children to grow up understanding what [...]

25Aug2010 | David R. Henderson | 6 comments | Continued

Forgotten Lines

In the January 23, 2010, Los Angeles Times crossword puzzle, one of the clues was “Sassy reply to criticism.” The answer: “It’s a free country.” Why do I find this so striking? For two reasons. First, when I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, not many people around me considered that a sassy reply. [...]

20Apr2010 | David R. Henderson | 4 comments | Continued

The Balance-of-Payments Deficit: Not to Worry

Quick. What’s the trade deficit between California and the rest of the world? Don’t try Googling it because you won’t find an answer. No government agency—or private entity—computes the dollar value of goods that people in the rest of the world sell to or buy from Californians. Why not? Because it doesn’t matter. Yet governments [...]

5Jan2010 | David R. Henderson | 7 comments | Continued

The Real Meaning of Privilege

“They live in an expensive mansion, fly first-class to foreign countries, and eat at the finest restaurants. They send their kids to private schools. They’re so privileged.” How often have you heard some variant of the lines above? I’d bet it’s a lot. Yet, typically, the word “privileged” is inaccurate. We certainly all know or [...]

23Sep2009 | David R. Henderson | 11 comments | Continued

Government Fundamentalism

Many free-market economists like me are quite willing to admit that markets don’t work perfectly and to examine and accept government solutions if their advocates can show how governments can be motivated to actually carry them out. And yet we are called market fundamentalists. On the other hand, many people who call us that are unwilling to change any of their views about the efficacy of government intervention no matter how badly the intervention works. Who are the fundamentalists here?

21May2009 | David R. Henderson | 16 comments | Continued

Unintended Consequences in Energy Policy

On the first day of every economics class I teach I start with The Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom. This is a list I have put together of the ten most important principles in economics. Pillar number six is, “Every action has unintended consequences; you can never do only one thing.” U.S. energy policy illustrates [...]

2Mar2009 | David R. Henderson | 11 comments | Continued

Was Money Really Easy Under Greenspan?

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has become everyone’s favorite scapegoat. His policies allegedly caused, or at least contributed to, the current financial crisis. He is attacked from the left for lax financial regulation, from the right for loose monetary policy, and from the middle for both. Yet two years ago, on leaving office, Greenspan [...]

2Mar2009 | and and David R. Henderson | 7 comments | Continued

Are You Being Served?

“In the animal kingdom,” said psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, “the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.” It is important to use words carefully, to use words that have as exact a meaning as you can achieve. Those who manage to persuade others to use the words they wish [...]

1Nov2008 | David R. Henderson | 3 comments | Continued

Let’s Not Be Energy Independent

“Energy independence” is a term that sounds good but falls apart on closer examination. Although the United States could achieve energy independence, we could do so only at an enormous cost. Energy “dependence” is much cheaper and much more desirable. Before considering the costs and benefits of energy independence, I should define my terms. What [...]

1Oct2008 | David R. Henderson | 10 comments | Continued

Freedom, Drugs, and the Workplace

Imagine that you work for an employer whom you respect, and you like your job. Then you find out that your employer uses marijuana for a medical condition. On further inquiry, you learn that he uses it completely legally and, as far as you can tell, it doesn’t affect his performance as an employer. Should [...]

1Jul2008 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | Continued

How Free Markets Break Down Discrimination

One of my favorite lines in the classic movie The Magnificent Seven comes when a traveling salesman and his partner offer to pay the local undertaker to haul a dead Indian to boot hill. The undertaker refuses. He’d like to oblige, he explains, but the townsfolk are so prejudiced against burying Indians alongside whites that [...]

1Apr2008 | David R. Henderson | 3 comments | Continued

Health Care Is Worse Here than Elsewhere?

In the November 13, 2007, Washington Post, columnist Eugene Robinson attacked former Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani’s claim that health care is better in the United States than in countries with socialized medicine. Robinson offers evidence that socialized medicine in various industrialized countries isn’t much worse, and is sometimes better, than U.S. health care, but [...]

1Mar2008 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | Continued

The Lesson of Ebenezer Scrooge

In 2003, I co-led a successful fight against Measure Q, which would have increased the Monterey County, Calif., sales tax to fund a failing government hospital. One proponent of the tax labeled me a Scrooge. She was referring, of course, to Ebenezer Scrooge, the protagonist of Charles Dickens’s famous novel A Christmas Carol—and of the [...]

1Dec2007 | David R. Henderson | 16 comments | Continued
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