Archive for Robert Batemarco
Robert Batemarco is senior director of business insights at a marketing research consultancy in New York City.
Economics of a Pure Gold Standard
Early in his marriage, Ludwig von Mises told his wife that despite writing prolifically about money he was never likely to earn a great deal of it. Mark Skousen makes the case in Austrian Economics for Investors (subtitled Ludwig von Mises Goes to Wall Street) that the ideas of Mises and his confreres do indeed [...]
1Dec1996 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | ContinuedIt’s No Gamble: The Economic and Social Benefits of Stock Markets
Theodore Roosevelt once quipped, “There is no moral difference between gambling at cards or in lotteries or on the race track and gambling in the stock market.” John Maynard Keynes echoed this view: “When the capital development of a country becomes the by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be [...]
1Sep1996 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Free Society
Failure to go back to first principles in considering what government should do lies at the heart of the sterility of so much of today’s public debate on the issues. Lansing Pollock’s The Free Society seeks to fill that void by providing philosophical foundations for his version of limited government libertarianism. His freedom principle is [...]
1Aug1996 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Literature of Liberty
The Reverend Mr. Opitz, a contributing editor of The Freeman, was a senior staff member of the Foundation for Economic Education until his retirement in 1992. He was book review editor of The Freeman for many years. In addition to editing the book review section of The Freeman, Dr. Batemarco is a [...]
1May1996 | and Edmund A. Opitz | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Solzhenitsyn Files
“Freedom without a literature is like health without food. It just cannot be. To be sure, the yearning for freedom is deep in the hearts of men, even the slaves of the Soviets. But the yearning can turn into hard, numb despair if the faith upon which freedom thrives is not revivified from time to [...]
1Mar1996 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Review: The Case for Free Trade and Open Immigration edited by Richard M. Ebeling and Jacob G. Hornberger
The Future of Freedom Foundation • 1995 • 143 pages • $17.95 cloth; $9.95 paperback Should a free country’s freedom stop at its borders? Libertarians have long answered this question with a resounding “No!” Yet in recent years, some staunch friends of a free and open economy have come to see open borders as a [...]
1Dec1995 | Robert Batemarco | 1 comment | ContinuedBook Review: Gold and Liberty by Richard M. Salsman
Great Barrington, Mass.: American Institute for Economic Research • 1995 • 145 pages • $8.00 paperback About five years ago, a young banker sat next to me on the commuter train I take home from work. Noticing that I was reading about central bank policies, he engaged me in conversation on that topic. He enthused [...]
1Nov1995 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | ContinuedCentral Banks, Gold, and the Decline of the Dollar
Are inflation, currency depreciation, and business cycles inevitable facts of life? Are they part of the very laws of nature? Or do their origins stem from the actions of man? If so, are they discoverable by economic science? And, if economics can teach us their origins, can it also teach us how to avoid them? [...]
1Nov1995 | Robert Batemarco | 6 comments | ContinuedBook Review: The American Revolution Resurgent by Raphael G. Kazmann
Scott-Townsend Publishers: Washington, D.C. • 1994 • 186 pages • $15.00 paperback Take a heavy dose of principle, add some solid economic reasoning and a scattering of historical examples, leaven it with some unconventional definitions, and you have The American Revolution Resurgent. This book clearly lays out the consequences of America’s jettisoning the constitutional republic [...]
1Oct1995 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Review: Cliches of Politics edited by Mark Spangler
The Foundation for Economic Education 1994 • 314 pages • $15.95 paperback There’s much truth in the old saying that it’s not so much what people don’t know that hurts them, as what they know that just isn’t so. Indeed, when things we know that aren’t so are used to shape public policy, it hurts [...]
1Jul1995 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Review: Princess Navina Visits Mandaat by Count Nef (pseudonym for James L. Payne)
Sandpoint, Idaho. Lytton Publishing • 1994 • 55 pages • $8.95 paperback We Americans have grown accustomed to a large measure of government control over our persons and property. Such serious intrusions on our liberties as zoning laws, public schooling, and government regulation of food and drugs are so taken for granted that to question [...]
1Jun1995 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Review: Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue edited by Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar
The University of Chicago Press • 1994 • 208 pages • $27.50 F.A. Hayek died in 1992 at the age of 92. Most readers of The Freeman know of his writings on business cycles and political philosophy. But what of Hayek the man? Hayek on Hayek, a supplement to the planned 19-volume Collected Works of [...]
1May1995 | Robert Batemarco | 1 comment | ContinuedBook Review: The Right Data by Edwin S. Rubenstein, et al.
National Review Books • 1994 • 409 pages • $17.95 paper Did you know that 82 percent of the jobs created between 1982 and 1989 required high levels of skill and paid accordingly? . . . or that in 1990, there was one tax consumer for every 1.3 taxpayers? . . . or that during [...]
1Dec1994 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Review: Bankers and Regulators with an introduction by Hans F. Sennholz
The Foundation for Economic Education, 1993 • 176 pages • $14.95 paperback “Money is different,” we are told by practically every member of the economics profession, including many who stand tall against government intrusion in every other sector of the economy. This difference, in their eyes, legitimizes government provision and control of money as well [...]
1Jul1994 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | ContinuedLending Discrimination: The Unending Search
Dr. Batemarco, The Freeman’s book review editor, teaches economics at Marymount College, Tarrytown, New York. This paper was delivered at the December 1993 Round Table at FEE. H. L. Mencken once called politics “the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” You don’t [...]
1May1994 | Robert Batemarco | 1 comment | ContinuedBook Review: A Retrospective on the Bretton Woods SystemLessons for International Monetary Reform edited by Michael D. Bordo and Barry Eichengreen
The University of Chicago Press • 1993 • 690 pages • $75.00 What constitutes the ideal international monetary system? To this reviewer, and presumably most readers of The Freeman, it would be a system which could not be manipulated by governments and central bankers, thus subject to neither inflationary expansions nor deflationary collapses. Its various [...]
1Feb1994 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Review: The Seven Fat Yearsand How To Do It Again by Robert L. Bartley
The Free Press, 866 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10022 347 pages • $22.95 Robert Bartley has written a history of U.S. economic policy during the 1970s and 1980s from a supply-side perspective. Given his position as editor and vice president of The Wall Street Journal, he draws heavily from that publication for source material. [...]
1Dec1992 | Robert Batemarco | 0 comments | Continued-
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