Archive for Richard M. Ebeling

Richard Ebeling teaches economics at Northwood University and is a former president of FEE.

Fair Trade for All: How Trade Can Promote Development

Joseph Stiglitz is a professor of economics at Columbia University. He served as a member and then chairman of President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1997, and then was the chief economist and senior vice president at the World Bank from 1997 to 2000. In 2001 Stiglitz was awarded the Nobel [...]

18May2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued

The Current Economic Crisis and the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle

Richard Ebeling is completing his tenure as the president of FEE. This fall he will teach economics at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. The current financial crisis emerged out of an economic boom that began in 2003 and saw rising stock values, increasing home prices, and high levels of employment and production. The upturn followed [...]

1Jun2008 | Richard M. Ebeling | 4 comments | Continued

Freedom and the Right of Self-Determination

The most guarded prerogative of every government is its legitimized monopoly over the use of force within its territorial jurisdiction. The second most important prerogative is its exclusive control over all its territory. By implication, governments therefore claim an exclusive right over the political, economic, and cultural destinies of the people under their control. If [...]

1May2008 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued

The German Economic Miracle and the “Social Market Economy”

Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. This summer marks the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the post-World War II German “economic miracle.” When the war ended in Europe in 1945, Germany was in a shambles. Its major cities had been destroyed either from Allied bombing or urban combat. Millions of its citizens had [...]

1Apr2008 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

A Department of Homeland Happiness Security? Only if We Want to Be Unhappy!

Richard Ebeling (rebeling@fee.org) is the president of FEE. It is more than 230 years since Adam Smith observed that each individual is a better judge of how best to apply his productive efforts than any statesman who would direct the economic activities of the citizenry. Furthermore, Smith said, any such power “would nowhere be so [...]

1Mar2008 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued

The Free Market versus the Interventionist State

During the first half of 1926, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises visited the United States on a three-month lecture tour. After his return to his native Austria, he delivered a talk on “Changes in American Economic Policy” at a meeting of the Vienna Industrial Club. He explained: The United States has become great and rich [...]

1Jan2008 | Richard M. Ebeling | 5 comments | Continued

Marching to Bismarck’s Drummer: The Origins of the Modern Welfare State

Soviet socialism may now be a thing of the past, but there is one form of statism that still dominates the world, including the United States: the modern welfare state. Its tentacles of paternalistic control reach into every corner of personal and social life. It has made all of us “children of the state,” and [...]

1Dec2007 | Richard M. Ebeling | 5 comments | Continued

The Soviet Chamber of Horrors: Reminders on the Ninetieth Anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution

In 1842 the German poet Heinrich Heine warned that “Communism, though little discussed now and loitering in the hidden garrets on miserable straw pallets, is the dark hero destined for a great, if temporary, role in the modern tragedy. . . . Wild, gloomy times are roaring toward us. . . . The future smells [...]

1Nov2007 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

The American Spirit of Enterprise

America has been the land of opportunity and free enterprise, an example and a hope for tens of millions of people around the world. In America both the industrious worker and the creative entrepreneur have been hailed as the complementary producers of prosperity and rising standards of living. Class and caste were meant to play [...]

1Oct2007 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

Menagerie of Happy Men: The Ancient Incas and the Bureaucratic State

Examples of bureaucratic control over social life seem to be as old as recorded history, and they always have features that are universal in their perverse effects regardless of time or place. The French economist and historian Louis Baudin described some of these consequences in his classic work, A Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru [...]

1Sep2007 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

The Great French Inflation

Governments have an insatiable appetite for the wealth of their subjects. When governments find it impossible to continue raising taxes or borrowing funds, they have invariably turned to printing paper money to finance their growing expenditures. The resulting inflations have often undermined the social fabric, ruined the economy, and sometimes brought revolution and tyranny in [...]

1Jul2007 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

Hans F. Sennholz: Champion of Freedom and Austrian Economics

Richard M. Ebeling is the president of FEE. For more than half a century Austrian-school economist Hans F. Sennholz demonstrated that learning about the free market was not an exercise in the “dismal science.” An extremely popular public speaker and immensely prolific writer, Hans educated and persuaded thousands of people about the virtues of the [...]

1Jun2007 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued

Freedom and the Role of Government

Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. What is the role of government? This has been and remains the most fundamental question in all political discussions and debates. Its answer will determine the nature of the social order and how people will be expected and allowed to interact with one another—on the basis of either [...]

1May2007 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

Ending the Welfare State Through the Power of Private Action

Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. Despair about the current direction of American public policy is easily understood. In whichever direction we look, government seems to be growing larger and more intrusive. For example, in February the Associated Press (AP) reported that in spite of the 1996 welfare reform, which has reduced the number [...]

1Apr2007 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

The Cost of the Federal Government in a Freer America

Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. In February, President George W. Bush submitted his proposed federal budget for the fiscal year that begins in October. It called for total government spending of over $2.9 trillion. The administration and the Republicans in Congress insisted that this budget reflected fiscal responsibility and the promise of a [...]

1Mar2007 | Richard M. Ebeling | 2 comments | Continued

The Euro versus Currency Competition

It is now four years since the euro was introduced as a circulating currency in parts of the European Union. Both Europeans and others are becoming increasingly used to a single money in much of the continent. If the euro remains in use for another five or ten years people may well look back at [...]

1Jan2007 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

Milton Friedman (1912-2006)

Milton Friedman, who died last month at age 94, was one of the twentieth century’s most influential champions of individual liberty and free markets. The 1976 winner of the Nobel Prize in economics and an early associate of FEE, Friedman did more than any single person in our time to teach the public the merits [...]

1Dec2006 | and and Richard M. Ebeling | 4 comments | Continued
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