Archive for Robert Batemarco

Robert Batemarco is senior director of business insights at a marketing research consultancy in New York City.

How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes

Ignorance of economics is rampant. The average person believes the secret to prosperity is consumption and was often led to that fallacy by professional economists who should know better. Economic education in the universities has been as much a part of the problem as the solution, with millions of students taught Keynesian beliefs about government [...]

22Jun2011 | Robert Batemarco | 4 comments | Continued

Making Poor Nations Rich: Entrepreneurship and the Process of Economic Development

During the 2008 presidential campaign, a critic of then-candidate Barack Obama stated in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, “If he becomes president, I hope he hires some economists who understand why Great Britain, China, Hong Kong and South Korea all prospered when they let private industry rather than government allocate their country’s resources.” [...]

22Oct2010 | Robert Batemarco | 1 comment | Continued

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, from the Pilgrims to the Present

Professor Thomas DiLorenzo of Loyola College, Maryland, has managed to pack two books into the volume titled How Capitalism Saved America. The first is the work promised in the title, the inspiring story about the creative power of that nexus of voluntary exchanges known as capitalism. The second, more sobering, book inhabiting these same pages [...]

13Jul2010 | Robert Batemarco | 24 comments | Continued

The Case for Big Government

Could it be that our already immense government is still too small? That’s what some people, including economic journalist Jeff Madrick, would have us believe. The first sentence of The Case for Big Government reads, “It is conventional wisdom in America today that high levels of taxes and government spending diminish America’s prosperity.” While this [...]

20May2010 | Robert Batemarco | 1 comment | Continued

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

Most people seize on the failure to practice what one preaches as proof of the error of the message preached. This is the logical fallacy known as tu quoque. It is far more often the case, however, that the message is virtuous but virtue is not what the hypocritical preacher truly seeks. Ha-Joon Chang, author [...]

2Mar2009 | Robert Batemarco | 1 comment | Continued

Time and Money: The Macroeconomics of Capital Structure by Roger W. Garrison

Routledge • 2001 • 272 pages • $99.00 Reviewed by Robert Batemarco Although it was Tolstoy who said that “the highest wisdom has but one science—the science of the whole,” these words express with uncanny accuracy the practice of the Austrian school of economics. One of the hallmarks of that school is that it sees [...]

1Jun2002 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | Continued

There’s No Place Like Work by Brian C. Robertson

Spence Publishing Company · 2000 · 206 pages · $24.95 Reviewed by Robert Batemarco This book is about the choices American parents struggle to make regarding the balance between work and home life. The author, Brian C. Robertson, a research fellow at the New Economy Information Service, has found those choices, over the past four [...]

1Aug2001 | Robert Batemarco | 1 comment | Continued

Monopoly Politics by James C. Miller III

Hoover Institution Press • 1999 • 157 pages • $17.95 The Founding Fathers were well aware that it takes more than ideas, as important as they are, to permit freedom to flourish. It takes institutions—private property, foremost, and political institutions that will protect rather than plunder it. Thus the political system they established was designed [...]

1Feb2001 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | Continued

15 Great Austrian Economists

Great economists come in many varieties. There are path-breakers, who forge new analytical tools; there are synthesizers, who discern principles capable of explaining disparate phenomena; and there are debunkers, who root out error, strangling it in its own contradictions so that truth may flourish. Most of those designated great by their inclusion in 15 Great [...]

1Aug2000 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | Continued

Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen

It has been said that one of the devil’s favorite tricks is to make you think he does not exist. In Freedom in Chains, James Bovard shows how the cheerleaders for statism have spent the last two and a half centuries trying to persuade us that government coercion does not exist, or at least is [...]

1May2000 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | Continued

Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law by J. Budziszewski

InterVarsity Press • 1997 • 252 pages • $15.99 The canard that free-market economists are so narrowly focused on economic concerns that they miss the big picture seems as indestructible as it is indefensible. It was Ludwig von Mises, after all, who said that one cannot be a good economist if he is only an [...]

1Jan1999 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | Continued

The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945, 2nd edition by George H. Nash

Intercollegiate Studies Institute • 1996 • 467 pages • $24.95 “We see so far because we stand on the shoulders of giants.” In a nutshell, this is the major lesson to be learned from The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945 by George Nash. First published 20 years ago, this tome breathes life into [...]

1Sep1997 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | Continued

Why Managed Trade Is Not Free Trade

The British historian Thomas Babington Macaulay observed that free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can bestow, is in almost every country unpopular.[1] Indeed, sound economics often makes for unsuccessful politics. That free trade is a great benefactor is one of the most convincingly established truths of economic science.[2] The economic case [...]

1Aug1997 | Robert Batemarco | 18 comments | Continued

Three Fallacies of Rent Control

From New York to Boston to Toronto, rent control is under attack. Not surprisingly, beneficiaries of this legislated plunder of providers rental housing are sparing no effort to maintain their unmerited privileges. In so doing, they resort to a wide variety of fallacious arguments. Three in particular stand out and will be discussed here. 1. [...]

1Jun1997 | Robert Batemarco | 1 comment | Continued

Book Review: The Truth About the National Debt: Five Myths and One Reality by Francis X. Cavanaugh

Harvard Business School Press • 1996 • 192 pages • $22.95 The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason. In this book, Francis X. Cavanaugh, an astute former Treasury Department economist, applies these words of T. S. Eliot to most of the popular discussion of federal budget [...]

1Apr1997 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | Continued

Book Review: Austrian Economics: An Anthology edited by Bettina Bien Greaves

The Foundation for Economic Education • 1996 • 176 pages • $14.95 paperback In my years in academia, I’ve attended many seminars in Austrian economics and even taught a few. Indeed, Austrian Economics: An Anthology reminds me of nothing so much as one of those scholarly assemblies—a seminar between covers, if you will. Led by [...]

1Feb1997 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | Continued

Book Review: Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade by Douglas A. Irwin

Princeton University Press • 1996 • 275 pages • $30.00 Dr. Batemarco is director of analytics at a marketing research firm in New York City and teaches economics at Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York. The economics of free trade has virtually nothing to do with professional boxing. Yet this book reminded me of the [...]

1Jan1997 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | Continued
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