Archive for Sheldon Richman
Sheldon Richman is the editor of The Freeman and TheFreemanOnline.org, and a contributor to The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. He is the author of Separating School and State: How to Liberate America's Families.
Social Cooperation
At FEE’s Advanced Austrian Economics Seminar last summer, more than one speaker mentioned that Ludwig von Mises considered a different title for the book we know as Human Action. The other title? Social Cooperation. I’ve heard that story before, but this time it got me thinking: Would the free-market movement have been perceived differently by [...]
26Oct2011 | Sheldon Richman | 5 comments | ContinuedProgressive Intolerance
Television pundits increasingly express an attitude that is at once arrogant and ignorant: The people who oppose Keynesian economics—specifically an increase in government deficit spending to create jobs and jumpstart the economy—are the same kind of people who also believe that the earth is only several thousand years old (rather than 4.5 billion), that evolution [...]
26Oct2011 | Sheldon Richman | 7 comments | ContinuedLet Sleeping Failures Lie: The Reconstruction Finance Corporation
The most fallacious argument for an RFC is that it can provide capital when there is a shortage. Obviously, the government has no capital of its own.
21Oct2011 | Sheldon Richman | 5 comments | ContinuedDestroying Value
It’s sad enough that we waste precious resources and labor because we are fallible. It’s so much sadder when this happens because government policies lead rational people to make stupid decisions.
14Oct2011 | Sheldon Richman | 18 comments | ContinuedIt Takes a Government to Inflate a Housing Bubble
If you want to fully appreciate government’s responsibility for the housing bubble and ensuing financial meltdown, see this article by Peter Wallison. Choice quote: Beginning in 1992, the government required Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to direct a substantial portion of their mortgage financing to borrowers who were at or below the median income in [...]
12Oct2011 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedWall Street Couldn’t Have Done It Alone
To Occupy Wall Street: Wall Street couldn’t have done it alone. It takes a government and/or its central bank, the Federal Reserve System, to: Create barriers to entry for the purpose of sheltering existing banks from competition and radical innovation, then regulate for the benefit of the privileged industry; Issue artificially cheap, economy-distorting credit in [...]
7Oct2011 | Sheldon Richman | 63 comments | ContinuedSteve Jobs, Entrepreneur
We can see in Steve Jobs the Misesian entrepreneur. In a variety of ways he blazed trails and brought forth products that make our lives more pleasant, more productive — more fun.
7Oct2011 | Sheldon Richman | 10 comments | ContinuedOccupying Wall Street
Most if not all of the protesters likely favor a big expansion of government, but in light of our political-economic history, that would be precisely the wrong way to go.
30Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 36 comments | ContinuedNatural, Not National, Rights
Somewhere in my reading about immigration, someone made the deceptively simple point that it’s not immigrationwe should be talking about but migration. That’s another way of saying the focus has been on us, when it should be on the people coming to the United States. The discussion has proceeded as if they have no rights in the matter [...]
26Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 9 comments | ContinuedWhat Happened to Greed?
Progressive commentators usually berate business people for their greed. These days they berate them for sitting on tons of cash, refusing to invest and hire — in other words, for not being greedy enough. How can we integrate these two “faults” without resorting to an explanation like “regime uncertainty,” Robert Higgs’s term for an environment [...]
23Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 5 comments | ContinuedElizabeth Warren’s Non Sequitur
Boiled down, Warren’s argument is that since everyone has paid taxes to provide services without which wealthy people couldn’t have made their money, they should pay more. How does that follow?
23Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 82 comments | ContinuedOf Malice and Straw Men
We libertarians must be onto something. Why else would critics work so hard to construct straw men to demolish rather than contending with our actual arguments? Right from the top you could tell that Stephen Metcalf’s blast in Slate would be no different. “Liberty Scam” featured this teaser: “Why even Robert Nozick, the philosophical father [...]
21Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 5 comments | ContinuedThe New Fed
“Things are seldom what they seem.” —W. S. Gilbert, “H.M.S. Pinafore” Nowhere is this more true than in government, which means we have to watch it closely. Unfortunately preconceived notions can make us impervious to events right in front of us and lead us to colossal misperceptions. Take the Federal Reserve System. (All together now: [...]
21Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedThomas Paine on Society & Government
In connection with today’s TGIF, I reproduce a quotation from Thomas Paine (The Rights of Man), who thought government a “necessary evil.” In it, Paine anticipates work by Bastiat, Lysander Spooner, Benjamin Tucker, Carl Menger, Mises, Hayek, Bruno Leoni, Anthony de Jasay, Elinor Ostrom, Peter Boettke, Peter Leeson, and more. Great part of that order which [...]
16Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 7 comments | ContinuedGovernment Is Force
Government is different from anything else in society, the only institution that can legally threaten and initiate violence against nonaggressors.
16Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 62 comments | ContinuedDid Obama’s “Stimulus” Create or Save Jobs?
The official line is that President Obama’s 2009 “stimulus” package (tax cuts and spending increases) “created or saved” more than 3.5 million jobs. Is that so? It depends on what you mean by created, saved, and jobs. It is certainly true that the federal government gave money to the states and localities, and some of [...]
13Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | Continued-
The Latest
Contraception: Insuring the Uninsurable
Update below. Controversy rages over the Obama administration’s mandate that all employers – including... Read More
The Snow Plowers’ Petition
The following might have happened in a small college town in upstate New York… In a cold and snowy... Read More
Super Bowl versus Education?
In the spirit of Super Bowl weekend I’d like to deconstruct a Facebook status update that a friend... Read More
Capitalism, Corporatism, and the Freed Market
When a front-running presidential contender tells the country that thanks to Barack Obama, “[w]e are... Read More
Creating Jobs versus Creating Value
Picking on New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is one of the largest participation sports on the Internet.... Read More
