Pursuit of Happiness
Rule of Law versus Legislative Orders
Webster’s dictionary defines law as all the rules of conduct established and enforced by the authority, legislation, or custom of a given community or group. Why are there laws in the first place? The most apparent answer is, were there not a particular law, some people would not conduct themselves according to the law in [...]
23Oct2009 | Walter E. Williams | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Real Meaning of Privilege
“They live in an expensive mansion, fly first-class to foreign countries, and eat at the finest restaurants. They send their kids to private schools. They’re so privileged.” How often have you heard some variant of the lines above? I’d bet it’s a lot. Yet, typically, the word “privileged” is inaccurate. We certainly all know or [...]
23Sep2009 | David R. Henderson | 6 comments | ContinuedEFCA and Compromise
As proposed, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) would 1) replace secret-ballot union representation elections with card-check certification of unions as exclusive (monopoly) bargaining agents for workers in their workplaces; 2) impose compulsory-interest arbitration on employers who do not agree to a first union contract within 130 days; and 3) increase penalties on alleged unfair [...]
19Aug2009 | Charles W. Baird | 0 comments | ContinuedSchool Choice
The overall quality of primary and secondary education received by white students is nothing to write home about. The very fact that 30 percent of college freshmen require remedial education, at a cost of over $2 billion, is pretty good evidence that there is widespread fraud in the conferring of high-school diplomas. That level of [...]
17Jun2009 | Walter E. Williams | 0 comments | ContinuedGovernment Fundamentalism
Many free-market economists like me are quite willing to admit that markets don’t work perfectly and to examine and accept government solutions if their advocates can show how governments can be motivated to actually carry them out. And yet we are called market fundamentalists. On the other hand, many people who call us that are unwilling to change any of their views about the efficacy of government intervention no matter how badly the intervention works. Who are the fundamentalists here?
21May2009 | David R. Henderson | 10 comments | ContinuedOrganizing and the Organized
Congress permits unions to bargain for workers who do not want such representation, and it compounds this violation of freedom of association by permitting unions to force workers they represent to pay union dues and fees as a condition of continued employment. So-called union security has given rise to a circus of legal disputes which [...]
24Apr2009 | Charles W. Baird | 3 comments | ContinuedWhere Does Your Vote Really Count?
To encourage us to participate in the political process, we are told that every vote counts. That is true if one is adding up the total votes, but what is the likelihood of any one person’s vote affecting the outcome of a presidential election? Simply put, it is equal to the probability that the person’s [...]
1Apr2009 | Walter E. Williams | 0 comments | ContinuedUnintended Consequences in Energy Policy
On the first day of every economics class I teach I start with The Ten Pillars of Economic Wisdom. This is a list I have put together of the ten most important principles in economics. Pillar number six is, “Every action has unintended consequences; you can never do only one thing.” U.S. energy policy illustrates [...]
2Mar2009 | David R. Henderson | 7 comments | ContinuedHow Bad Can it Get?
In August the Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF) in Washington state released its State of Labor 2008 (the Report), which warns of several perils emanating from the growth of government-sector collective bargaining and offers suggestions for ameliorating them. (The Report is available in PDF here .) I predict these perils will soon be much more severe [...]
20Jan2009 | Charles W. Baird | 0 comments | Continued
Fuzzy Thinking
George Orwell warned, “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” That is the challenge—not allowing language and ill-defined terms to corrupt thought—that I face teaching economics to both graduate and undergraduate students. Terms that are widely used can have considerable emotional worth but little or no analytical value, ambiguous meaning, or unappreciated [...]
1Dec2008 | Walter E. Williams | 9 comments | ContinuedAre You Being Served?
“In the animal kingdom,” said psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, “the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.” It is important to use words carefully, to use words that have as exact a meaning as you can achieve. Those who manage to persuade others to use the words they wish [...]
1Nov2008 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | ContinuedWorker Freedom in Peril
The Alliance for Worker Freedom (AWF) recently published its 2007 Index of Worker Freedom (IWF).The index ranks each of the 50 states on the basis of ten variables that affect the freedom of workers. “Freedom” is defined properly as the absence of interferences with individual worker choices.
After explaining the ten variables used and identifying [...]
Unpleasant Economists
Economists are not the most pleasant people to have around when others are delightfully praising the benefits of this or that public policy. We acknowledge the existence of scarcity, the fact that to enjoy more of one thing requires having less of another, which in turn forces us into bringing up the unpleasant topic of [...]
1Sep2008 | Walter E. Williams | 0 comments | ContinuedFreedom, Drugs, and the Workplace
Imagine that you work for an employer whom you respect, and you like your job. Then you find out that your employer uses marijuana for a medical condition. On further inquiry, you learn that he uses it completely legally and, as far as you can tell, it doesn’t affect his performance as an employer. Should [...]
1Jul2008 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | ContinuedFaculty Unions Versus Academic Legitimacy
The faculty at Montana State University in Bozeman will soon vote on whether to unionize. If a majority vote yes, the school will gradually descend into academic mediocrity or worse.
The vast majority of unionized faculty in higher education are employed in government colleges and universities. This is because in 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court, in [...]
How Free Markets Break Down Discrimination
One of my favorite lines in the classic movie The Magnificent Seven comes when a traveling salesman and his partner offer to pay the local undertaker to haul a dead Indian to boot hill. The undertaker refuses. He’d like to oblige, he explains, but the townsfolk are so prejudiced against burying Indians alongside whites that [...]
1Apr2008 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | ContinuedStealing for Union Bosses
Charles Baird is a professor of economics emeritus at California State University at East Bay.
H. L. Mencken opined that “Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” The November 2006 congressional elections are an excellent example of Mencken’s proposition.
The attempts by the 110th Congress to steal property and other rights from [...]
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Book Reviews
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Montessori, Dewey and Capitalism: Educational Theory for a Free Market In Education
By Jerry Kirkpatrick
