Archive for William H. Peterson
Mad About Trade: Why Main Street America Should Embrace Globalization
Free trade is the consumer’s best friend and a great contributor to peace. Pressing those ideas home is Cato Institute trade expert Daniel Griswold’s challenge in this book. He is mad for trade, while too many others are mad against trade. As an example of the latter, consider radio host and writer Lou Dobbs, who [...]
25Aug2010 | William H. Peterson | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Right Nation: Conservative Power in America
As I read them, our British authors, the sharp and witty Washington-based editors of the weekly London-based Economist, are modern-day if imperfect Alexis de Tocquevilles, updating Democracy in America by some 165 years. Recall the shrewd Tocqueville’s prescience in seeing how America, then but 45 years old and supposedly constrained by the Constitution, could wax [...]
10Jul2010 | William H. Peterson | 0 comments | ContinuedBusinessmen on Business Values
A Cato Institute report issued last October estimates corporate welfare at $87 billion in 2001. That’s 30 percent bigger than Cato’s previous 1997 corporate welfare estimate of $65 billion. Welfare for business? Business in bed with the state? What goes on? (See Stephen Slivinski, “The Corporate Welfare Budget: Bigger Than Ever,” Cato Policy Analysis No. [...]
30Jun2010 | William H. Peterson | 0 comments | ContinuedFree Trade: Key to Peace and Prosperity
Contributing editor William Peterson (whpeterson@ aol.com) is an adjunct scholar with the Heritage Foundation. At a time of international tension and a so-so economy, we are fortunate that the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas has issued its essay (online or in hard copy) “The Fruits of Free Trade.” It comes from the Dallas Fed’s 2002 [...]
1Jan2004 | William H. Peterson | 1 comment | ContinuedIn Defense of Free Capital Markets: The Case Against a New International Financial Architecture
Thanks partly to Enron and Arthur Andersen, “financial reform” is in the air. Grab your wallet. Indeed, the entire global financial market is under threat of tighter regulation. How come? Well, look to recent experience, from the Mexican peso crisis to the collapse of the Asian financial markets to the Russian devaluation of the ruble [...]
1Aug2002 | William H. Peterson | 1 comment | ContinuedLeviathan: America’s Secret Challenge
How helpful of physicist S. Fred Singer, head of the Washington area-based Science and Environmental Policy Project, to restore the idea of “hormesis.” Hormesis is the principle that things beneficial to life in low doses can be fatal in high doses. Singer mentions such things as alcohol, sunshine, iodine, sodium, iron, copper, cholesterol, and nuclear [...]
1Jul2002 | William H. Peterson | 2 comments | ContinuedIn Defense of Scalping
I submit that it’s not disingenuous for the Broadway producers of The Producers to say they’re trying to “strike a blow at the heart of the scalping operation” by setting aside at least 50 seats for each performance and charging a cool $480 a ticket. That price is almost five times the $100 charged for [...]
1Feb2002 | William H. Peterson | 1 comment | ContinuedIt’s Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends in the Last 100 Years
It’s not for nothing that economics is tagged “the dismal science.” Part of that reputation traces to its realistic no-pie-in-the-sky nature, but another part goes to the ongoing influence of thinkers like Thomas Malthus, who saw population outracing food output; Karl Marx, who saw evil capital crushing the rising working class; and John Maynard Keynes, [...]
1Jan2002 | William H. Peterson | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Ten Things You Can’t Say in America by Larry Elder
St. Martin’s Press · 2000 · 367 pages · $23.95 cloth; $14.95 paperback Reviewed by William H. Peterson There is hope yet for America. Larry Elder is a host of a successful talk show on KABC Radio in Los Angeles and a nationally syndicated columnist who wins the imprimatur of a major book publisher to [...]
1Oct2001 | William H. Peterson | 0 comments | ContinuedU.S. by the Numbers: Figuring What’s Left, Right, and Wrong with America State by State by Raymond J. Keating and Thomas N. Edmonds
Capital Books • 2000 • 960 pages • $35.00 An Entrepreneurial Revolution. This is the watchword-guidepost here of Mr. Keating, chief economist of the Washington D.C.-based Small Business Survival Committee, and Mr. Edmonds, a political media consultant and coauthor with Mr. Keating of their successful 1995 book, D.C. by the Numbers: A State of Failure. [...]
1Jun2001 | William H. Peterson | 1 comment | ContinuedMay Day: Classlessness and Mr. Marx
Contributing editor William Peterson is an adjunct scholar with the Heritage Foundation. May Day is a signal to radical labor groups and parties the world over to take to the streets, make fiery speeches, parade, protest, demonstrate, and carry an increasingly common if bizarre placard, “Capitalism Kills.” So the holiday, set by the Second Socialist [...]
1May2001 | William H. Peterson | 0 comments | ContinuedA Cure Worse Than The Disease: Fighting Discrimination Through Government Control
“America’s constant curse.” So the British weekly The Economist brands racism long after the appearance of “affirmative action,” the official policy unleashed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and designed to “correct” historical injustices by instituting preferences for members of certain “protected classes.” This law and its legal embellishments blithely ignore the First Amendment [...]
1Dec2000 | William H. Peterson | 0 comments | ContinuedMore Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well
Statist “liberals,” take cover. Your sacred cows are fair game in this hard-hitting work by a witty, insightful, and even radical hunter of wrongheaded conventional wisdom somehow mesmerizing the mainline media, clergy, Congress, academe, and other purveyors of mulish political correctness. Did I say Congress? Well, hear the author, professor of economics at George Mason [...]
1Aug2000 | William H. Peterson | 3 comments | ContinuedThe Golden Rule and the Free Market
William Peterson is a Heritage Foundation adjunct scholar and Distinguished Lundy Professor Emeritus at Campbell University, Buies Creek, North Carolina. How tantalizing to find that virtually all the world’s major religions exalt the Golden Rule in one way or another: Christianity: All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even [...]
1Jun2000 | William H. Peterson | 0 comments | ContinuedLimited Government, Individual Liberty and the Rule of Law: Selected Works of Arthur Asher Shenfield edited by Norman Barry
Edward Elgar Publishing • 1998 • 378 pages • $100.00 How well I remember Arthur Shenfield (1909-1990), an unforgettable man learned in law and economics and a keen student of a free society. We used to debate privately about who was the greater economist, Mises or Hayek. I chose Mises, he Hayek. I had the [...]
1Jan2000 | William H. Peterson | 0 comments | ContinuedPrinciples for a Free Society: Reconciling Individual Liberty with the Common Good
Law and economics were once openly tied, as witness the title of John Stuart Mill’s 1848 work, Principles of Political Economy. Or consider that Ludwig von Mises and F. A. Hayek both held doctorates from the University of Vienna not in economics but in jurisprudence. Economics came into its own as a “pure” science, however, [...]
1Nov1999 | William H. Peterson | 0 comments | ContinuedAmerican Abundance: The New Economic and Moral Prosperity by Lawrence A. Kudlow
Forbes-American Heritage • 1997 • 212 pages • $22.95 William Peterson, a Heritage Foundation adjunct scholar, is the Distinguished Lundy Professor Emeritus of Business Philosophy at Campbell University in North Carolina. Over the last 15 years, the U.S. economy has experienced a 3 percent real average rate of growth in gross domestic product (with only [...]
1Apr1999 | William H. Peterson | 0 comments | Continued-
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