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).
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 | 6 comments | ContinuedGovernment 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 | 10 comments | ContinuedUnintended 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 | 7 comments | ContinuedAre 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 | 0 comments | ContinuedLet’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 is [...]
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 | ContinuedHow 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 | 0 comments | ContinuedHealth Care Is Worse Here than Elsewhere? It Just Ain’t So!
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 | ContinuedThe 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 | 0 comments | ContinuedPharmaceutical Profits and Health Are Inconsistent? It Just Ain’t So!
In a critical review of Richard Epstein’s book Overdose: How Excessive Government Regulation Stifles Pharmaceutical Innovation, Arnold Relman (The New Republic, July 30) criticizes drug companies for their hypocrisy. Contrasting the companies’ message to stockholders with their message to the larger world, he quotes Pfizer President Jeffrey Kindler’s statement that his goal is “to create [...]
1Nov2007 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | ContinuedOur Skyrocketing Living Standards
In the mid-1950s, when I was a young child, I would occasionally see a man walking along the street with a grapefruit-size growth in his throat. The first time I saw such a thing I gasped. My mother hushed me up and told me later that the man had a goiter. The last time I [...]
1Sep2007 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Pursuit of Happiness ~ Milton Friedman: A Personal Tribute
David Henderson (davidrhenderson1950@gmail.com) is a research fellow with the Hoover Institution and an economics professor at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School. His latest book, co-authored with Charles L. Hooper, is Making Great Decisions in Business and Life (Chicago Park Press, 2006).
So much has been written about Milton [...]
Big Government — Big Risk
In his Freeman column last June, “The End Run to Freedom,” economist Russell Roberts makes the following argument: As people get wealthier, they demand more security. Their demand for security leads many people to favor the welfare state or the nanny state. The welfare state refers to a government that subsidizes people who bear losses; [...]
1Jan2007 | David R. Henderson | 3 comments | ContinuedJohn Kenneth Galbraith: A Criticism and an Appreciation
Last April John Kenneth Galbraith died at the age of 97. Galbraith was one of America ’s most famous economists and a self-proclaimed liberal (in the American sense of “statist” rather than in the European sense of “believer in freedom”). His fame came not from his technical accomplishments in academic economics but from his awesome [...]
1Dec2006 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | ContinuedRaising the Minimum Wage Will Discourage Migration? It Just Aint So!
In “Raise Wages, Not Walls,” an op-ed in the July 25 New York Times, Michael Dukakis and Daniel Mitchell make a proposal that is breathtaking in its misunderstanding of basic economics. After showing problems with the various congressional proposals to limit illegal immigration, they give their own solution: increase the minimum wage. They write, “If [...]
1Nov2006 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | ContinuedOnly the Rich Are Getting Richer? It Just Ain’t So!
“In an era when the rich are the only income group getting richer,” begins an article in the April 13 Washington Post. (Blaine Harden, “As the Rich Ride In, Many Are Priced Out of Homes on the Range.”) But in this one 13-word statement, versions of which have become so common in conversations and newspaper [...]
1Aug2006 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | ContinuedWe Need Medical Rationing? It Just Ain’t So!
In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times (“A Health Care Prescription that’s Hard to Swallow,” January 30, 2006), Henry Aaron, a well-known health economist at the Brookings Institution, made the following argument:
Spending on health care in the United States is rising as a percent of GDP and could go from its current 16 [...]
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
