Anything Peaceful
Obama’s “Accommodation” on Contraception
President Obama tells us that through his “accommodation” on the contraception controversy he’s avoided “choos[ing] between individual liberty and basic fairness for all Americans.” How so? By ordering insurance companies to give away birth control pills.
11Feb2012 | Sheldon Richman | 6 comments | ContinuedHonesty Is Not the Best Political Policy
An honest statist would just say: “Let’s have the government levy a tax on men to pay for women’s birth control.” The transfer program wouldn’t be buried in the employer-based insurance system. It would be open for all to see — which is why it’s not done that way.
10Feb2012 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedPondering the Imponderable about Contraception
If Woman A pays for Woman B’s birth control and Woman B pays for Woman A’s birth control, does each get free birth control?
10Feb2012 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedYesterday’s and Today’s Attacks on Government Censorship
Recently many popular websites went black to fight the proposed SOPA and PIPA bills. Fighting censorship, however, is nothing new. Today’s document is a short story in Newsweek from August 5, 1948, that tells of the role Newsweek book editor Karl Schriftgiesser played in H. L. Mencken’s 1926 arrest for selling a banned issue of [...]
8Feb2012 | Nicholas Snow | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Naughty Mr. Hazlitt
In digging through the archives at the Foundation for Economic Education, one comes across a variety of correspondences, from the friendly to the boring and from the hostile to the downright amusing. Today’s document is a correspondence between Henry Hazlitt and a Major L.L.B. Angas. Hazlitt and Angas disagreed about the merit and viability of [...]
6Feb2012 | Nicholas Snow | 3 comments | ContinuedContra-IP
My article “Patent Nonsense,” which makes the libertarian case against “intellectual property,” was published and posted by The American Conservative magazine. Read it here.
3Feb2012 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedWe’re the Economy They Want to Manage
In his State of the Union speech President Obama said: Tonight, I want to . . . lay out a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last. . . . Considering that an economy (a free one, that is) is just people engaging in exchanges for mutual benefit, it defies blueprinting, which sounds ominously [...]
26Jan2012 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedIs It a Tax or Not?
In his State of the Union speech the other night President Obama said: Right now, our most immediate priority is stopping a tax hike on 160 million working Americans while the recovery is still fragile. People cannot afford losing $40 out of each paycheck this year. There are plenty of ways to get this done. [...]
26Jan2012 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedTaxation 101
Is it asking too much for reporters to know the difference between taxes paid and the percentage of income paid in taxes? Despite what the reporters imply, Warren Buffett did not pay less in taxes than his secretary, even if he paid a smaller percentage of his income in taxes.
24Jan2012 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | ContinuedDo-Nothing Congress?
The 112th Congress is being judged as do-nothing because it passed only 80 bills in 2011, the smallest number since 1947. It shouldn’t be judged by how many bills it passed, but by how many laws it repealed.
24Jan2012 | Sheldon Richman | 55 comments | ContinuedPeter Boettke on Austrian Economics
George Mason University Professor and FEE trustee Peter Boettke was interviewed about Austrian economics at The Browser. Pete is among the most knowledgeable people in the world about this important school of thought and the larger context in which it exists. Highly recommended! Read it here.
17Jan2012 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedBusts Are Not Punishments for Booms
As a follow-up to today’s TGIF about Matthew Yglesias’s critique of Austrian economics, I note that he claims that for Austrians “the suffering of a bust is a kind of cosmic payback for the boom.” Paul Krugman has similarly charged that Austrians see the bust in moralistic terms, as though it were just punishment for [...]
13Jan2012 | Sheldon Richman | 7 comments | ContinuedFed Secretly Bails Out Big Banks
From Bloomberg: Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing. The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so [...]
29Nov2011 | Sheldon Richman | 23 comments | ContinuedWhat Congress Is Fighting Over
Here’s what the growth in federal spending would look like with and without the ten-year $1.2 trillion “cut” to be trigged by the supercommittee’s failure. HT: Nick Gillespie
21Nov2011 | Sheldon Richman | 33 comments | ContinuedCato Launches Libertarianism.org
The Cato Institute has unveiled a new website, Libertarianism, which will, in editor Aaron Ross Powell’s words, “facilitate[] deep and fruitful discussion of these ideas [of liberty]. And . . . introduce[] visitors to the value of the presumption of liberty.” The site will feature classic and new articles and video lectures, never shown before, of [...]
3Nov2011 | Sheldon Richman | 5 comments | ContinuedJust Wondering
Would Bernard Madoff’s prospective victims have been better or worse off in a world with no government oversight of investment matters whatsoever? Is necessary to spell out the answer?
31Oct2011 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | ContinuedWilliam A. Niskanen, RIP
Bill Niskanen, an important Public Choice economist and long-time chairman of the Cato Institute, died earlier this week. I had the pleasure of having Bill as a colleague during my five years at Cato in the 1990s. He was unfailingly helpful and friendly, a fount of good sense in many ways. He was also supportive [...]
28Oct2011 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued-
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