Anything Peaceful

The 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 | | 3 comments | Continued

Contra-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 | | 0 comments | Continued

We’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 | | 1 comment | Continued

Is 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 | | 3 comments | Continued

Taxation 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 | | 5 comments | Continued

Do-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 It shouldn’t be judged by how many bills it passed, but by how many laws it repealed.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 | | 55 comments | Continued

Peter 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 | | 0 comments | Continued

Busts 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 | | 8 comments | Continued

Fed 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 | | 25 comments | Continued

What 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 | | 38 comments | Continued

Cato 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 | | 5 comments | Continued

Just 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 | | 6 comments | Continued

William 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 | | 0 comments | Continued

Seems to Me …

“Tax the Rich!” sounds greedy.

14Oct2011 | | 10 comments | Continued

It 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 | | 1 comment | Continued

Wall 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 | | 66 comments | Continued

What 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 | | 5 comments | Continued
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