Pursuit of Happiness

Employer 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 | Continued

Population Control Nonsense

According to an American Dream article, “Al Gore, Agenda 21 and Population Control,” there are too many of us and it has a negative impact on the earth. Here’s what the United Nations Population Fund said in its annual State of the World Population Report for 2009, “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate”: [...]

30Nov2011 | Walter E. Williams | 10 comments | Continued

Henderson’s Iron Law of Government Intervention: The 1967 Detroit Riot

The more I have studied government policy over the last 40 or so years, the more strongly I have come to believe that whatever problem you name, some government intervention—a tax, a subsidy, a spending program, or a government regulation—was an important cause or, at a minimum, made the problem worse. The evidence for this [...]

26Oct2011 | David R. Henderson | 5 comments | Continued

Crony Unionism: Government Sector

In my last column I illustrated how private-sector unions depend on government cronies to keep them afloat. In the government sector it is much, much worse. It is nothing less than a conspiracy between politicians, bureaucrats, and unions to create and sustain a fourth branch of government specifically designed to increase the cost, size, and [...]

21Sep2011 | Charles W. Baird | 2 comments | Continued

Forked-Tongued Washington Government

The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was the first federal statute to limit cartels and monopolies and still forms the basis for most antitrust litigation by the Department of Justice. The Act contains two important provisions. Section 1 outlaws contracts and conspiracies in restraint of trade. Section 2 prohibits monopolization and attempts to monopolize. Most [...]

24Aug2011 | Walter E. Williams | 3 comments | Continued

The Right Amount of Manufacturing

Mark Perry, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, recently pointed out that in 2009 the U.S. economy had the world’s largest manufacturing sector. (The most recent data show that China’s sector edged out the United States because of our slow economic recovery.) Every year since 2004 U.S. manufacturing output, in constant 2005 dollars, [...]

22Jun2011 | David R. Henderson | 7 comments | Continued

Crony Unionism: Private Sector

In America competition from union-free enterprises is making private-sector unionism increasingly irrelevant. Only 9 percent of union-free workers desire to become union members. The last redoubt for unions is government employment, and they are increasingly in peril even there. However, the unions are fighting back by running to politicians and bureaucrats for help. Unions needed [...]

25May2011 | Charles W. Baird | 2 comments | Continued

Poverty Is Easy to Explain

Academics, politicians, clerics, and others always seem perplexed by the question: Why is there poverty? Answers usually range from exploitation and greed to slavery, colonialism, and other forms of immoral behavior. Poverty is seen as something to be explained with complicated analysis, conspiracy doctrines, and incantations. This vision of poverty is part of the problem [...]

21Apr2011 | Walter E. Williams | 27 comments | Continued

War Is a Government Program

Libertarians and conservatives who argue for economic freedom and against government control tend to make both principled and practical arguments for their positions. Take health insurance, for example. The principled argument against government regulation of health insurance is twofold: (1) No government has the right to dictate to someone what kind of insurance he should [...]

23Mar2011 | David R. Henderson | 22 comments | Continued

Card Check Without Congress

In 2009 I made a bet with fellow Freeman columnist David R. Henderson that before the Obama presidency expires, Congress would enact substantial freedom-reducing changes—such as card check—to American union law. David, ever the optimist, didn’t think so. Inasmuch as Speaker Nancy Pelosi is just a bad memory from a horrible dream, and it is [...]

24Feb2011 | Charles W. Baird | 3 comments | Continued

Government and Conflict

Human differences such as race, ethnicity, religion, and language have always been sources of conflict. Despite arguments to minimize the importance of these differences, people still exhibit preferences in these areas when choosing a spouse, friend, business partner, employee, neighborhood, and other associations. People do not associate randomly. Efforts to deny such assortative behavior in [...]

22Dec2010 | Walter E. Williams | 4 comments | Continued

The Conquest of the United States by Militant Islam

In 1898 William Graham Sumner, a famous libertarian sociology professor at Yale University, gave a speech titled, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.” You read that right. In the same year the U.S. government had attacked Spanish forces in Cuba and the Philippines, a case of conquest by the United States, Sumner claimed [...]

24Nov2010 | David R. Henderson | 15 comments | Continued

Taking On Unions

In my last column I noted that unions seem to be losing respect among the public. It now appears that that loss of respect is translating into an increased willingness by voters, and even some politicians, to challenge unions, especially those that represent government employees. Rahm Emanuel famously opined that “You never let a serious [...]

22Oct2010 | Charles W. Baird | 3 comments | Continued

Washington’s Lies

During his campaign President Obama and his congressional supporters estimated that overhauling the nation’s health care system would cost $50–$65 billion a year. On June 15 the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that Obama’s overhaul would cost at least $1 trillion. It’s clear that Obama’s cost estimates are untrue, and over ten years, it’s likely [...]

22Sep2010 | Walter E. Williams | 6 comments | Continued

The Decline in Civil Liberties

On a flight from Chicago to Washington, D.C., in 1981, I sat beside a U.S. foreign service officer who had just finished a stint in Moscow. He told me that although he had enjoyed the job, he needed to get his family back to America because he wanted his children to grow up understanding what [...]

25Aug2010 | David R. Henderson | 6 comments | Continued

Henry Hazlitt on Unions: Part II

In my last column (November) I discussed Henry Hazlitt’s views on the economic effects of unions, exclusive representation and mandatory bargaining, labor’s alleged bargaining-power disadvantage, and the right to strike. Here I will discuss three other aspects of Hazlitt’s views on American unionism: involuntary unionism, government-employee unionism, and what he called the “Grand Illusion” of [...]

8Jul2010 | Charles W. Baird | 2 comments | Continued

How Did We Get Here?

The late Alabama governor George Wallace once said, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats.” Both Republicans and Democrats agree on taking our money. Where they differ is what to spend it on. A Democrat like Senator Edward Kennedy agrees to take our earnings and give them to cities and poor [...]

6Jul2010 | Walter E. Williams | 0 comments | Continued
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