Archive for Walter E. Williams

Walter Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University.

Population Control Nonsense

According to an American Dream article, “Al Gore, Agenda 21 and Population Control,” there are too many of us and it has a negative impact on the earth. Here’s what the United Nations Population Fund said in its annual State of the World Population Report for 2009, “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate”: [...]

30Nov2011 | Walter E. Williams | 10 comments | Continued

Forked-Tongued Washington Government

The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was the first federal statute to limit cartels and monopolies and still forms the basis for most antitrust litigation by the Department of Justice. The Act contains two important provisions. Section 1 outlaws contracts and conspiracies in restraint of trade. Section 2 prohibits monopolization and attempts to monopolize. Most [...]

24Aug2011 | Walter E. Williams | 3 comments | Continued

Poverty Is Easy to Explain

Academics, politicians, clerics, and others always seem perplexed by the question: Why is there poverty? Answers usually range from exploitation and greed to slavery, colonialism, and other forms of immoral behavior. Poverty is seen as something to be explained with complicated analysis, conspiracy doctrines, and incantations. This vision of poverty is part of the problem [...]

21Apr2011 | Walter E. Williams | 27 comments | Continued

Government and Conflict

Human differences such as race, ethnicity, religion, and language have always been sources of conflict. Despite arguments to minimize the importance of these differences, people still exhibit preferences in these areas when choosing a spouse, friend, business partner, employee, neighborhood, and other associations. People do not associate randomly. Efforts to deny such assortative behavior in [...]

22Dec2010 | Walter E. Williams | 4 comments | Continued

Washington’s Lies

During his campaign President Obama and his congressional supporters estimated that overhauling the nation’s health care system would cost $50–$65 billion a year. On June 15 the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that Obama’s overhaul would cost at least $1 trillion. It’s clear that Obama’s cost estimates are untrue, and over ten years, it’s likely [...]

22Sep2010 | Walter E. Williams | 6 comments | Continued

How Did We Get Here?

The late Alabama governor George Wallace once said, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats.” Both Republicans and Democrats agree on taking our money. Where they differ is what to spend it on. A Democrat like Senator Edward Kennedy agrees to take our earnings and give them to cities and poor [...]

6Jul2010 | Walter E. Williams | 0 comments | Continued

Is Monopoly Good or Bad?

Monopoly is nearly always seen as something undesirable. Courts have wrestled with monopoly for ages, sometimes defining it as “the power to control prices and exclude competition,” “restraining trade,” or “unfair and anticompetitive behavior.” Should monopolistic practices be condemned and outlawed? Let’s look at anticompetitive behavior and practices, but let’s not confine ourselves to what’s [...]

30Jun2010 | Walter E. Williams | 2 comments | Continued

Drugs, Economics, and Liberty

Only a few people would dispute that narcotics can harm people, whether that harm is in the form of damage to the body, mental and physical dependency, or threats to social relationships. However, there is not nearly as much consensus as to what the correct public response to narcotics use and sales is. Ideas range [...]

20May2010 | Walter E. Williams | 39 comments | Continued

A Contemptible Congress and a Derelict Court

What can Congress do that the Supreme Court would find unconstitutional? Or, what can Congress do that a president would veto as unconstitutional? It is not much exaggeration to say that Congress can do whatever it can muster a majority vote for, whether it is constitutional or not. The members only have to worry about [...]

24Feb2010 | Walter E. Williams | 5 comments | Continued

Rule of Law versus Legislative Orders

Webster’s dictionary defines law as all the rules of conduct established and enforced by the authority, legislation, or custom of a given community or group. Why are there laws in the first place? The most apparent answer is, were there not a particular law, some people would not conduct themselves according to the law in [...]

23Oct2009 | Walter E. Williams | 1 comment | Continued

School Choice

The overall quality of primary and secondary education received by white students is nothing to write home about. The very fact that 30 percent of college freshmen require remedial education, at a cost of over $2 billion, is pretty good evidence that there is widespread fraud in the conferring of high-school diplomas. That level of [...]

17Jun2009 | Walter E. Williams | 1 comment | Continued

Where Does Your Vote Really Count?

To encourage us to participate in the political process, we are told that every vote counts. That is true if one is adding up the total votes, but what is the likelihood of any one person’s vote affecting the outcome of a presidential election? Simply put, it is equal to the probability that the person’s [...]

1Apr2009 | Walter E. Williams | 0 comments | Continued
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Fuzzy Thinking

George Orwell warned, “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” That is the challenge—not allowing language and ill-defined terms to corrupt thought—that I face teaching economics to both graduate and undergraduate students. Terms that are widely used can have considerable emotional worth but little or no analytical value, ambiguous meaning, or unappreciated [...]

1Dec2008 | Walter E. Williams | 9 comments | Continued

Unpleasant Economists

Economists are not the most pleasant people to have around when others are delightfully praising the benefits of this or that public policy. We acknowledge the existence of scarcity, the fact that to enjoy more of one thing requires having less of another, which in turn forces us into bringing up the unpleasant topic of [...]

1Sep2008 | Walter E. Williams | 0 comments | Continued

Rights Versus Wishes

Critics of the U.S. health-care system often suggest that we should adopt the single-payer universal systems of other countries. The serious problems encountered by those systems are increasingly documented and well known, such as the long waiting lists, restrictions on physician choice, and rationing in countries such as Canada, Italy, Greece, and the United Kingdom. [...]

1May2008 | Walter E. Williams | 0 comments | Continued

Economics and Property Rights

Economic theory does not operate in a vacuum. Institutions, such as the property-rights structure, do not change economic theory but influence how the theory manifests itself. Similarly, the law of gravity is not repealed when a parachutist floats gently down to earth. The parachute simply determines how the law of gravity manifests itself. Failure to [...]

1Jan2008 | Walter E. Williams | 0 comments | Continued

The Intellectual Defense of Liberty

All too often defenders of free-market capitalism base their defense on the demonstration that free markets allocate resources more efficiently and hence lead to greater wealth than socialism and other forms of statism. While that is true, as Professor Milton Friedman frequently pointed out, economic efficiency and greater wealth should be seen and praised as [...]

1Oct2007 | Walter E. Williams | 0 comments | Continued
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