Archive for Roy E. Cordato
Too Much Freedom
Roy Cordato is vice president for research and resident scholar at the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina.
It’s been said that when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. For politicians, bureaucrats, and many activists, when the only tool they have is coercion, the cause of every problem [...]
A Carbon Tax Will Fix Global Warming? It Just Aint So!
Roy Cordato (rcordato@johnlocke.org) is vice president for research at the John Locke Foundation and a member of the visiting economics faculty at North Carolina State University.
It amazes me how so many newspaper columnists have no qualms about voicing opinions on topics they clearly know nothing about. This is the case with Anne Applebaum, politics and [...]
Corporations Should Pay Higher Taxes? It Just Aint So!
The May 18 Washington Post article “Why Companies Pay Less” is less remarkable for what it says than for who is saying it. Its author is not Ralph Nader or Robert McIntyre of Citizens for Tax Justice. It is Steven Rattner, a well-known investment banker and a founder of the Quadrangle Group, a large private [...]
1Nov2004 | Roy E. Cordato | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Impossibility of Harming the Environment
“The ‘polluter pays principle’ states that whoever is responsible for damage to the environment should bear the costs associated with it.”
—United Nations Environmental Programme1
The “polluter pays principle” appeals to our sense of justice. People should be held responsible for their actions, and polluters who cause damage to others should “pay” for that damage. Furthermore, forcing [...]
High Gasoline Prices Are Your Fault? It Just Aint So!
Who should be blamed for the high oil and gasoline prices? OPEC? The oil companies? The government? According to the New York Times’s Floyd Norris, if you chose any of those you would be wrong. Writing on June 23, Mr. Norris places all the blame for the current “energy crisis,” as he calls it, squarely [...]
1Nov2000 | Roy E. Cordato | 0 comments | ContinuedFree Markets and Highest Valued Use
Roy Cordato is the Lundy Professor of Business Philosophy at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina.
Do free markets allocate resources to their highest valued use? It would seem that for the readers of Ideas on Liberty, the answer is a “no-brainer.” Indeed, the idea that voluntary exchange channels resources to where the [...]
Invisible Hand Obsolete? It Just Aint So!
Allen Murray’s Wall Street Journal article “Pushing Adam Smith Past the Millennium” (June 21, 1999) purports to discuss the relevancy of Adam Smith’s invisible hand for the 21st century. In reality, Murray is not talking about Smith or his invisible-hand metaphor at all. The assumption beneath his conclusion that “Smith’s ideas will need some rethinking [...]
1Nov1999 | Roy E. Cordato | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Review ~ Taxing Choice: The Predatory Politics of Fiscal Discrimination Edited by William F. Shughart II
Transaction Books • 1997 • 411 pages • $39.95 cloth; $19.95 paperback
Roy Cordato is Lundy Professor of Business Philosophy, Campbell University, Buies Creek, North Carolina.
As faith in big government programs has waned in the past two decades so has the ability of the government to raise revenues through income-tax increases. Until [...]
Should There Be a Carbon Subsidy?
Roy Cordato is the Lundy Professor of Business Philosophy at Campbell University in Buies Creek North Carolina.
The Clinton administration has committed the United States to a massive reduction in the use of energy. That is the implication of its signing the United Nation’s Global Climate Treaty in Kyoto, Japan. If the Senate approves, [...]
Market-Based Environmentalism vs. the Free Market
Dr. Cordato is the Lundy Professor at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina. For a much more detailed discussion of this issue see Roy E. Cordato, “Market-Based Environmentalism and the Free Market: They’re Not the Same,” The Independent Review, vol. 1, no. 3 (Winter 1997).
People on both the left and right are [...]
Income and the Question of Rights
Dr. Cordato is the Lundy Professor at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina.
On C-SPAN’s Journalist Roundtable program, Victor Kamber, a Democratic Party political consultant, and conservative author David Frum were discussing whether Congress should pass an amendment to the Constitution allowing states to ban flag burning. As an aside, Mr. Kamber said that [...]
Book Review: Environmentalism at the Crossroads: Green Activism in America by Jonathan Adler
The Capital Research Center • 1995 • 299 pages • $30 paperback
Dr. Cordato is the Lundy Professor at Campbell University in Buies Creek, North Carolina.
Jonathan Adler, director of environmental studies for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is one of the brightest young writers and researchers in the burgeoning field of free-market environmentalism. His essays [...]
Book Review: Public Goods and Private Communities: The Market Provision of Social Services by Fred Foldvary
Edward Elgar Publishing • 1994 • 288 pages • $59.95
The primary purpose of academic programs in urban economics is to train central planners. Traditionally college courses in state and local public finance and urban economics have rationalized everything that local governments do, while invoking elaborate formulations about how these governments might do what they [...]
Section 89: Tax Code Limits Workers’ Choices
Dr. Cordato is an economist with The Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation in Washington, D.C.
Over the last decade workers have come to benefit by an invigorating dose of competition and choice with respect to health insurance plans. While most companies once offered their employees one health insurance policy—take it or leave [...]
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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
