Archive for Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Enron and Argentina Are Examples of Market Failure? It Just Aint So!
In the eyes of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, nearly everything that goes wrong in the world is caused by the fact that government is not big and powerful enough. In a mid-December 2001 column he blamed both the bankruptcy of Enron and the collapse of the Argentine economy on deregulation. But, as is [...]
1May2002 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 0 comments | ContinuedProsperity Is Hazardous to Our Health and Wealth? It Just Aint So!
The left long ago abandoned the argument that socialism would produce greater prosperity than capitalism (although Paul Samuelson still clung to this belief as late as 1988) and now devotes most of its energy to fabricating myriad “problems” with capitalist prosperity. A particularly shallow example of this argument was recently on display in a February [...]
1Jun2001 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 0 comments | ContinuedAntitrust Benefits Consumers? It Just Aint So!
Robert Litan, vice president and director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution and a former adviser to Janet Reno on the Microsoft antitrust case, recently authored the stereotypical Washington Post economic policy op-ed: virtually void of elementary economic analysis while uncritically promoting more and more government intervention (“Fair Use of Antitrust,” September 13, 2000).
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Paul Heyne, R.I.P.
Contributing editor Thomas DiLorenzo is an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute at Auburn University and a professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Most Americans have probably never heard of University of Washington economist Paul Heyne, who recently passed away. That’s a shame, for Paul was arguably the most effective economic educator in [...]
Trade and the Rise of Freedom
Thomas DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland. This is adapted from a paper presented at the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s conference on “’The History of Liberty” at Auburn University, January 29, 2000.
It is no exaggeration to say that trade is the keystone of modern civilization. As Murray Rothbard wrote, “The [...]
Regulatory Extortion
Thomas DiLorenzo is a professor of economics at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland. This article is based on a presentation prepared for the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s conference, “Austrian Economics and the Financial Markets,” last September in Toronto.
In 1978 Michael Jensen and William Meckling, writing in the Financial Analysts Journal, offered an extraordinarily gloomy prediction [...]
Hurricanes Are Creative Destruction? It Just Ain’t So!
My employer, Loyola College, is a Jesuit institution and, as such, encourages its students to participate in myriad community-service programs. In teaching introductory economics, I propose on the first day of class a marriage of economic education and community service. I offer to give students aluminum baseball bats with which they will walk through the [...]
1Feb2000 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 0 comments | ContinuedLegalized Theft Is Good for the Poor? ~ It Just Aint So!
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich spent the 1980s at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government spreading lies in the service of socialism. Not socialism as government ownership of the means of production but rather, as F. A. Hayek defined it in The Road to Serfdom, “chiefly the extensive redistribution of incomes through taxation and [...]
1Oct1999 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 0 comments | ContinuedIt Just Aint So!
Harvard University law professor Einer Elhauge argued in the Washington Post last summer that free-market economists who oppose the multibillion-dollar tobacco litigation have made a big mistake. Professor Elhauge writes that opponents are apparently unaware that for the past 40 years the tobacco companies conspired in order “not to independently market safer tobacco products” and [...]
1Dec1998 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Ghost of John D. Rockefeller
At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on competitiveness in the computer industry last March, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates was compared to the infamous "robber baron" John D. Rockefeller and his company likened to the Standard Oil Company of the late nineteenth century. Federal Trade Commission chairman Robert Pitofsky made a similar analogy in a Washington [...]
1Jun1998 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Myth of the Independent Fed
Dr. DiLorenzo is a professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Ever since its founding in 1913, the Fed has described itself as an independent agency operated by selfless public servants striving to fine-tune the economy through monetary policy. In reality, however, a non- political governmental institution is as likely as a barking cat. [...]
Book Review: The Good Life and Its Discontents: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement by Robert J. Samuelson
Times Books • 1995 • 293 pages • $25.00
Dr. DiLorenzo is professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
The Good Life and Its Discontents, by journalist Robert J. Samuelson (no relation to the economist Paul Samuelson), is a well-written exposition of some of the failures of interventionist economic policy over the past 50 [...]
Predatory Unionism
Dr. DiLorenzo, this month’s guest editor, is Professor of Economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Many economists have long viewed unions as essentially cartels of workers which collude to push their wages above free-market levels. As Texas A&M University labor economist Morgan Reynolds has explained: “Unions are fundamentally cartels—groups of producers with sectional interests diametrically [...]
The Crusade for Politically-Correct Consumption
Dr. DiLorenzo is Professor of Economics at Loyola College in Maryland.
Neo-puritanism seems to be running amok in the United States. The federal excise tax on alcohol was doubled in 1991; many states have sharply increased tax rates on tobacco products and have enacted myriad smoking bans; the Washington Post reports a growing movement to [...]
Economic Fascism
When people hear the word “fascism” they naturally think of its ugly racism and anti-Semitism as practiced by the totalitarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. But there was also an economic policy component of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and ‘30s as “corporatism,” that was an essential ingredient of economic totalitarianism as practiced [...]
1Jun1994 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 5 comments | ContinuedThe New Industrial Policy
Dr. DiLorenzo is Professor of Economics in the Sellinger School of Business and Management at Loyola College in Baltimore.
Money will go where the political power is . . . . It will go where the union power is mobilized. It will go where the campaign contributors want it to go. It will go where [...]
Why Socialism Causes Pollution
Corporations are often accused of despoiling the environment in their quest for profit. Free enterprise is supposedly incompatible with environmental preservation, so that government regulation is required.
Such thinking is the basis for current proposals to expand environmental regulation greatly. So many new controls have been proposed and enacted that the late economic journalist Warren [...]
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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
