Archive for Robert Higgs
Robert Higgs is senior fellow at the Independent Institute, editor of The Independent Review, and author of Neither Liberty nor Safety: Fear, Ideology, and the Growth of Government (Independent Institute).
Ten Reasons Not to Abolish Slavery
Slavery existed for thousands of years, in all sorts of societies and all parts of the world. To imagine human social life without it required an extraordinary effort. Yet, from time to time, eccentrics emerged to oppose it, most of them arguing that slavery is a moral monstrosity and therefore people should get rid of [...]
18Nov2009 | Robert Higgs | 5 comments | ContinuedThe Rise of Big Business and the Growth of Government
Most people learn about the relation between the rise of big business and the growth of government in the form of what amounts to a morality play. In the most widely disseminated version, presented in nearly every American history textbook, the emergence of big business (playing the role of the devil) is said to have [...]
19Aug2009 | Robert Higgs | 1 comment | ContinuedNew Deal or Raw Deal? How FDR’s Economic Legacy Has Damaged America
Not everyone loved President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Even in 1936, when he enjoyed his most lopsided electoral victory, almost 17 million voters cast their ballots for Alf Landon. During Roosevelt’s long presidency, he attracted vigorous literary critics, such as H. L. Mencken, John T. Flynn, and Garet Garrett. But the winners write the history, and [...]
19Aug2009 | Robert Higgs | 1 comment | ContinuedChurchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”
As a soldier, politician, and writer, Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874–1965) made a deep imprint on world history for more than half a century. He is best known for rallying his countrymen during the fateful Battle of Britain when he was prime minister—thereby, many people believe, stemming the flood that was sweeping Adolf Hitler to [...]
11Jun2009 | Robert Higgs | 57 comments | ContinuedThe Two-Price System: U.S. Rationing During World War II
As the United States mobilized for war after mid-1940, the government’s demands for munitions and related resources began to put pressure on certain markets, and soon prices began to rise. In 1941 they rose faster: from December 1940 to December 1941, the producer price index increased by 17 percent, the consumer price index by 10 [...]
24Apr2009 | Robert Higgs | 4 comments | ContinuedNixon’s New Economic Plan
Richard Nixon had a crisis mentality. In 1962, unhappily out of public office, he wrote an autobiographical account entitled Six Crises. Whereas some presidents have faced real crises, however, Nixon’s were more the product of his personal sense of siege. As president he twice declared a state of national emergency, first on March 23, 1970, [...]
20Jan2009 | Robert Higgs | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Great Escape from the Great Depression
Questions about the Great Depression may be usefully framed as pertaining to three distinct issues: the Great Contraction, the extraordinarily severe economic decline from 1929 to 1933; the Great Duration, the persistence of subpar economic performance for more than a decade; and the Great Escape, the ultimate recovery from this uniquely deep and long depression. [...]
1Oct2008 | Robert Higgs | 2 comments | ContinuedConstruction Boom and Bust Between the World Wars
Imagine a story about collapse of the real-estate markets that states: “Most of the millions piled up in paper profits had melted away, many of the millions sunk in developments had been sunk for good and all, the vast inverted pyramid of credit had toppled to earth, and the lesson of the economic falsity of [...]
1Jun2008 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedThe New Deal and the State and Local Governments
Until the twentieth century the average American in peacetime had little contact with the federal government, except for the post office, and the federal government’s policies and actions affected most people only indirectly—for example, through land-disposition policies or the tariff’s effect on commodity prices. State and local governments provided nearly all the government services the [...]
1Mar2008 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedWartime Origins of Modern Income-Tax Withholding
Wars have always been the most important occasions for the introduction of new forms of taxation. At the outset of a war the state suddenly needs greatly increased revenues to pay for personnel and matériel to prosecute the war. Although governments typically increase the rates of existing explicit taxes and raise the rate of the [...]
1Nov2007 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Great Duration, 1929-41
Economists, following the usage of Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz in their classic Monetary History of the United States, call the economic collapse between 1929 and 1933 the Great Contraction. In my own writings, I have added two similar terms to refer to other aspects of the Great Depression—the Great Duration and the Great Escape. [...]
1Jul2007 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Great Contraction, 1929-33
The recession that began in mid-1929 need not have become a disaster. Many downturns had occurred previously in U.S. economic history, and nearly all of them had been fairly shallow and soon followed by recovery and continued growth. In the nineteenth century most people had believed that the government neither knew how nor possessed the [...]
1Apr2007 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedFrom the Armistice to the Great Depression
When the Armistice took effect on November 11, 1918, bringing World War I to a close, the belligerent nations of Europe were economically almost prostrate—their labor forces and capital stocks depleted greatly, their domestic economic structures distorted grotesquely, and their old arrangements for international trade and investment shattered.
To make matters worse, the Versailles Treaty, signed [...]
When the Government Took Over U.S. Investment
In the oft-quoted final chapter of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes concluded that if we are to avoid a chronic tendency toward economic depression, the state will have to undertake, among other things, “a somewhat comprehensive socialisation of investment . . . though this need not exclude all manner [...]
1Sep2006 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedHow U.S. Economic Warfare Provoked Japan’s Attack on Pearl Harbor
Ask a typical American how the United States got into World War II, and he will almost certainly tell you that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the Americans fought back. Ask him why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and he will probably need some time to gather his thoughts. He might say that the [...]
1May2006 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedOur Economic Past ~ The Economic Policy of Machiavelli’s Prince
Niccol Machiavelli, statesman and writer of
Renaissance Florence, got what countless
writers have sought and only a few have
achieved: his name became immortal. It is known not so
much as a proper noun but as an adjective, and that
adjective is not one in which he could take great pride.
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Book Reviews
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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
