Peripatetics

Occupying 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 | Continued

Social Cooperation, Part 2

Last month I wrote about Ludwig von Mises’s emphasis on social cooperation as the basis of his economic philosophy, particularly in his magnum opus, Human Action. I thought I’d follow up with more thoughts on this subject. Mises was no maverick in this regard. Interest in social cooperation pervades the best classical-liberal and libertarian thought. [...]

30Nov2011 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Social Cooperation

At FEE’s Advanced Austrian Economics Seminar last summer, more than one speaker mentioned that Ludwig von Mises considered a different title for the book we know as Human Action. The other title? Social Cooperation. I’ve heard that story before, but this time it got me thinking: Would the free-market movement have been perceived differently by [...]

26Oct2011 | Sheldon Richman | 5 comments | Continued

Of Malice and Straw Men

We libertarians must be onto something. Why else would critics work so hard to construct straw men to demolish rather than contending with our actual arguments? Right from the top you could tell that Stephen Metcalf’s blast in Slate would be no different. “Liberty Scam” featured this teaser: “Why even Robert Nozick, the philosophical father [...]

21Sep2011 | Sheldon Richman | 5 comments | Continued

End the IMF

The sex scandal involving the recently departed International Monetary Fund chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn—criminal or not—was never a reason to abolish the agency. But then we didn’t need another reason. The agency, centerpiece of J. M. Keynes’s inflationary Bretton Woods brainchild, should never have been created in the first place, since it was another calculated step toward [...]

24Aug2011 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued

Budget-Cutting Resistance

So here’s the problem: While polls show that people want the government’s budget deficit and the national debt reduced, they don’t want the biggest spending items cut. In the April 17 ABC News-Washington Post poll, 59 percent said that the deficit should be reduced through a combination of unspecified spending cuts and tax increases. But [...]

22Jun2011 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | Continued

The Wrong Lesson from Egypt

One wrong conclusion being drawn from last winter’s popular uprising against the dictatorship in Egypt is that the American government could ignore such things if we were “energy independent.” (It’s unclear if this means independent of Middle Eastern oil or completely independent.) A moment’s reflection should be enough to jettison that thought, but even if [...]

25May2011 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued

The Importance of Subjectivism in Economics

After many years, Frédéric Bastiat remains a hero to libertarians. No mystery there. He made the case for freedom and punctured the arguments for state socialism with clarity and imagination. He spoke to lay readers with great effect. Bastiat loved the market economy, and badly wanted it to blossom in full—in France and everywhere else. [...]

23Mar2011 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

“F” as in Fed

The Federal Reserve, America’s fatally conceited monetary central planner, is not terribly popular these days—which is cause for hope—and now we have a report card on the entire Fed era that strongly supports the view that we’d be better off without it. At the very least, as the authors suggest, the burden of proof is [...]

24Feb2011 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

The Charade

Writing in Forbes recently, Dinesh D’Souza presents the bizarre idea that Barack Obama’s presidency can be best understood by realizing that “Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s [that is, Obama’s late estranged Kenyan father]. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world [...]

22Dec2010 | Sheldon Richman | 10 comments | Continued

Trading for Security

Americans tolerate a costly global national-security apparatus in part because they believe the country would be economically vulnerable without it. After all, we use resources from all over the world—oil being only the most prominent example. What if an embargo cut us off from supplies? Anyone expressing skepticism about this is sure to be confronted [...]

24Nov2010 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | Continued

Deficit Hawks or War Hawks?

Last month I asked if the American people can afford a world-girdling foreign policy more befitting an empire than a republic. Look at it this way: War hawks make poor deficit hawks. Facing a $13 trillion national debt and trillion-dollar-plus annual budget deficits, we can’t afford to be complacent about foreign interventions costing $12 billion [...]

22Oct2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Can America Afford an Empire?

Fiscally speaking, the U.S. government has been running a disorderly house for some time. That makes the fiscal crisis in Greece an uneasy portent for Americans (as Steven Horwitz points out in our July/August issue). Just contemplate some of the numbers. The total federal debt is nearly $13 trillion, $8.6 trillion of which is held [...]

22Sep2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

The Evil of Government Debt

As we’ve seen in the last two issues, Destutt de Tracy, writing in early nineteenth-century France, had solid insights about the market process and government spending as a form of consumption not investment. In light of that, no one will be surprised that Tracy opposed government borrowing. In this day of trillion-dollar-plus federal deficits, his [...]

25Aug2010 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | Continued

Stimulate the Catallaxy?

Last fall and winter’s brouhaha over the so-called economic stimulus package got me thinking about how far off target most people are when they talk about “the economy.” To hear the politicians and commentators tell it, the economy is a big machine located somewhere in Washington, D.C. That machine requires a skilled operator, and elections [...]

1Jul2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

Government as Consumer

Destutt de Tracy, as I discussed in the June issue, was a French economist whom Thomas Jefferson did his utmost to bring to the attention of America. The first part of Tracy’s A Treatise on Political Economy (1817), the translation of which Jefferson arranged, is a primer in economics that will satisfy any aficionado of [...]

29Jun2010 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued

Jefferson’s Economist

See update below. In 1817 the Frenchman Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) published his Treatise on the Will and Its Effects. Thomas Jefferson was so enthusiastic about Tracy’s book that he had it translated, then edited and revised the translation himself. He renamed it A Treatise on Political Economy. Why was Jefferson so excited about the [...]

20May2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued
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