Columns
The Mobility Gap: What Does It Mean?
“Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe.”
6Jan2012 | Sheldon Richman | 16 comments | ContinuedThe Tyranny of the Articulate
The real failure of deliberative democracy is that it’s a reflection of the tendency of academics to privilege their own world of reason, rhetoric, and articulate knowledge.
5Jan2012 | Steven Horwitz | 15 comments | ContinuedSome Sins of Textbook Economics
People who are ignorant of economics are susceptible to all sorts of misunderstandings. Fortunately knowledge of even just the basics of sound economics is a powerful inoculant against many dangerous falsehoods and half-truths. This fact, however, does not imply that exposure to more economics is necessarily good. The sad reality is that economists too often [...]
4Jan2012 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 12 comments | ContinuedDisaster Response Restores Confidence in Government?
In a memorable episode of the cult-classic cartoon series “The Tick,” the title character is seen in the local café regaling fellow superheroes with his latest adventure, in which he single-handedly stopped an alien plot that would have sucked the earth into a black hole. Skeptical, one of the other heroes responds, “Can you prove [...]
4Jan2012 | Tyler Watts | 0 comments | ContinuedOccupying Wall Street
The Occupy Wall Street agenda is vague, but the protesters at least have the good sense to know that something is awry with the political-economic system we labor under. Protesters carried a variety of signs, one of which stated, “End corporate welfare.” The Associated Press reported, “Demonstrators said Saturday they were protesting against bank bailouts [...]
4Jan2012 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | ContinuedRegime Uncertainty, Then and Now
In a 1997 article, “Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed After the War”, I advanced the idea of regime uncertainty in an attempt to improve our understanding of the Great Depression’s extraordinary duration and of the highly successful postwar transition to a genuinely prosperous market-oriented economy. The idea [...]
4Jan2012 | Robert Higgs | 4 comments | ContinuedGovernment the Job Killer
President Obama says government will have to build the nation out of the economic trough. “We’re the country that built the intercontinental railroad,” Obama says. “So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads?” I guess Obama doesn’t know that the transcontinental railroad was a Solyndra-like Big Government scandal. The [...]
4Jan2012 | John Stossel | 4 comments | ContinuedDestroying Value
In Cleveland and other American cities homes are being demolished because five years after the housing bust there is nothing better to do with them. Therein lies a lesson in Austrian business cycle theory. In a world of uncertainty, waste—the destruction of value—is inevitable. Human action, which aims to replace inferior circumstances with superior circumstances, [...]
4Jan2012 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedEmployer Speech and Freedom of Association
I have argued that forcing a worker to submit to the will of a majority of his colleagues on the question of whether a union will represent him is a violation of that worker’s freedom of association. Association with a union is rightly a matter of individual not collective choice. Here I want to consider [...]
4Jan2012 | Charles W. Baird | 1 comment | ContinuedVivien Kellems: Giving the Taxman Hell
If principles are expressed through people, then Vivien Kellems’s life shouts out that business is not the handmaiden of government.
3Jan2012 | Wendy McElroy | 21 comments | ContinuedGeorge Leef’s Top Ten
And the best books reviewed in The Freeman in 2011 are . . .
29Dec2011 | George C. Leef | 2 comments | ContinuedLawrence O’Donnell and Government Job-Creation
Government “job creation” is like flying in a heavy fog without instruments.
23Dec2011 | Sheldon Richman | 35 comments | ContinuedThere Is No Great Stagnation: Coffee Edition
The wonderful thing about markets is that firms are always trying to figure out how to deliver the things consumers want.
22Dec2011 | Steven Horwitz | 35 comments | ContinuedEconomic Independence: Bedrock of Freedom
Economic independence is the bedrock of all other freedoms.
20Dec2011 | Wendy McElroy | 16 comments | ContinuedFrom 1944 to Nineteen Eighty-Four
I’m inclined to think of George Orwell and F. A. Hayek at the same time. Both showed great courage in writing the truth, undaunted by the consequences awaiting them. Both valued freedom, though they understood it differently.
16Dec2011 | Sheldon Richman | 10 comments | ContinuedMr. Keynes’s Aggregates
Stimulus spending, bailouts, and extension of unemployment benefits only prevent the fundamental mechanisms of change from doing their work.
15Dec2011 | Steven Horwitz | 8 comments | ContinuedHayek and the Presumption of Goodwill
In a world of heated ideological differences and partisan political conflict, it’s tempting to paint our opponents as stupid and evil. We need to get past that. We need to keep learning.
13Dec2011 | Sandy Ikeda | 13 comments | Continued-
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