Archive for John Attarian
The Immorality of Social Security
Social Security’s defenders routinely laud it in moral terms, as “our most successful program of social reform,”[1] a humane, compassionate response to the needs of the elderly. One work puts it this way: None of us knows his or her fate. Today’s good fortune can turn into tomorrow’s disability. Most of us will gradually move [...]
1Jan1995 | John Attarian | 1 comment | ContinuedBook Review: Facing Up: How to Rescue the Economy from Crushing Debt and Restore the American Dream by Peter G. Peterson
Simon & Schuster • 1993 • 411 pages • $22.00 Though our national debt keeps soaring, efforts to face it honestly are rare. Peter Peterson’s Facing Up is one of the few. Founder of the deficit-fighting Concord Coalition, Peterson confronts the problem and offers a plan for budget balance by the year 2000. Spurning glib [...]
1Oct1994 | John Attarian | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Review: The God of the Machine by Isabel Paterson Introduction by Stephen Cox
Transaction Publishers, Rutgers-the State University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903, 1993 • 308 + lvii pages • $21.95 paperback First published in 1943, when voices raised in defense of freedom were few, The God of the Machine, “a study of the flow of energy and the nature of government as mechanism,” is both an ambitious and [...]
1Sep1994 | John Attarian | 2 comments | ContinuedBook Review: What Everyone Should Know About Economics and Prosperity by James D. Gwartney and Richard L. Stroup
Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 119 Ashman Street, P.O. Box 568, Midland, MI 48640 • 1993 • 120 pages • $5.00 paper Even economists can lose sight of basic principles in the complexities of modern economics. More ominously, economic illiteracy is endemic among the general public. Fortunately, Professors Gwartney and Stroup have produced a very [...]
1Apr1994 | John Attarian | 1 comment | ContinuedFreedom Versus Fear
Dr. Attarian is a free-lance writer in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Friends of freedom tightly see government control as a threat. From this many have passed on to condemn government and to call for anarchy, a minimal state, and so on. But while this line of thought has been fruitful of much insight, it risks engrossment [...]
1Mar1994 | John Attarian | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Review: On Liberty, Society, and Politics: The Essential Essays of William Graham Sumner edited by Robert C. Bannister
Liberty Fund, Indianapolis, Ind. • 1992 • 424 + xiii pages • $30.00 cloth $7.50 paperback Few thinkers suffer more at the hands of leftist statists than William Graham Sumner, routinely depicted as a heartless Social Darwinist and a reactionary bigot opposing social reform. Now that the activist government his critics craved has bogged in [...]
1Jan1994 | John Attarian | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Review: Social Security: What Every Taxpayer Should Know by A. Haeworth Robertson
Retirement Policy Institute, Washington, D.C. Order from: Retirement Policy Institute, Publications Division, P.O. Box 240242, Charlotte, NC 28224 • 1992 • 321 pages $40.00 cloth; $14.95 paperback Misunderstandings surrounding Social Security are on a scale comparable to its size and impact on our national life. Millions of Americans believe that they only recover in benefits [...]
1Nov1993 | John Attarian | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Review: Adventures in Porkland: How Washington Wastes Your Money and Why They Wont Stop by Brian Kelly
Villard Books • 1992 • 272 pages • $23.00 This concise, angry, intensely readable result of a year’s investigation of Congress should rouse every taxpayer’s rage. A $19 million study of cow flatulence; $80 million for Steamtown, USA (a national railroad museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania); $2 billion each for two useless waterways in Alabama and [...]
1Apr1993 | John Attarian | 0 comments | Continued-
The Latest
JPMorgan Chase and Casino Banking
JPMorgan Chase & Co., one of the nation’s leading banks, revealed in May that a London trader racked... Read More
Individualism, Trade-Unions, and “Self-Governing Combinations”
Who do you imagine said this? “[Trade-unions] seem natural to the passing phase of social evolution,... Read More
Bubbles, Malinvestment, and Higher Education
Many commentators are asking whether the next big bubble to burst will be the debt associated with the... Read More
JPMorgan’s Blunder Is No Market Failure
I am not going to try to defend JPMorgan Chase for its recent, widely reported financial blunders. ... Read More
For Equality; Against Privilege
This TGIF originally ran July 7, 2006. The freedom philosophy can be boiled down to two phrases: for... Read More
