It Just Ain't So
Profit is Bad for Your Health?
Many self-styled healthcare “reformers” favor a “public” (read: government) insurance option. The advantage of the government plan, President Obama said, is that “there wouldn’t be a profit motive involved.” Some supporters hoped the public option would be a step toward a single-payer government-run system in which the profit motive would disappear entirely from healthcare decisions.
Suspicion [...]
World War II Ended the Great Depression?
In his 2008 book, The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, Paul Krugman writes: “The Great Depression in the United States was brought to an end by a massive deficit-financed public works program, known as World War II.”
He has since repeated this bon mot in a number of columns and television appearances. [...]
Free-Marketeers Should Welcome Regulation?
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Paul Singer, chairman of the Manhattan Institute, suggests that “there is an urgent need for a new global regulatory initiative” to address the causes of the worldwide financial collapse and that even those who appreciate the qualities of free markets should welcome the new and different regulations he proposes [...]
23Sep2009 | Peter Lewin | 0 comments | ContinuedSaving Is Killing the Economy?
In the midst of the current recession, many of the oldest fallacies in economics are making a comeback. In a column titled “Why Saving is Killing the Economy,” senior writer Chris Isidore repeats one of the oldest: that the key to economic recovery or growth is consumption and that saving retards that process. Isidore states [...]
19Aug2009 | Steven Horwitz | 4 comments | ContinuedGovernment Must Keep Track of Derivatives?
Regardless of what caused the crisis, government efforts to regulate derivatives will only lock in undesirable aspects of the current market and ensure that politically connected players reap artificial gains. It is absurd to ask politicians to promote financial integrity and sound accounting. They are the worst violators of these principles on the planet.
17Jun2009 | Robert P. Murphy | 3 comments | ContinuedOil Prices Are Rigged? It Just Ain’t So!
In reality, all prices are determined by supply and demand, properly defined. Outside investors with lots of money can certainly influence prices, but there are always risks. Funds that had large “long” bets on commodities took a bath as oil fell from its July 2008 high of $145 down to well below $50 a few months later. Futures markets allow producers and consumers to hedge against needless risk by locking in prices, and they allow speculators with superior foresight to improve the allocation of resources over time. Our Time authors think they’ve shown that the oil market is rigged, but it just ain’t so!
21May2009 | Robert P. Murphy | 2 comments | ContinuedRegulation Will Stop Future Madoffs? It Just Ain’t So!
Bernard Madoff is a boon to financial regulation advocates. A well-known Wall Street figure, he confessed to defrauding his clients of $50 billion, an amazing number. It is now established conventional wisdom, blared across the media, that this and other financial disasters would likely not have happened had there been proper government supervision.
With deregulation fingered [...]
T. Boone Pickens is Right About Oil Imports? It Just Ain’t So!
The $700 billion that Americans spend annually to purchase oil from other countries (according to Pickens) is a price not a transfer. For the $700 billion we send to oil exporters, we get something in return—oil. Our receipt of millions of barrels of oil in exchange for that money is hardly a transfer. We receive a versatile commodity that can be used for everything from making plastics to fueling family vacations. The exporters receive the $700 billion that they can then use to purchase other goods and services.
1Apr2009 | E. Frank Stephenson | 3 comments | ContinuedGreenspan Should Be Shocked by Risky Lending?
Toward the end of his tenure as Fed chairman in early 2006, Alan Greenspan was the object of praise edging at times into adulation. It came from some unlikely sources. Milton Friedman penned an encomium for Greenspan in the pages of the Wall Street Journal titled, “The Greenspan Story: He Has Set a Standard.” After [...]
2Mar2009 | Gerald P. O'Driscoll Jr. | 0 comments | ContinuedIndividualism Clashes with Cooperation? It Just Ain’t So!
Individualists get a bad rap in politics these days. That should come as no surprise; politics these days is dominated by electoral politics, and electoral politics is an essentially anti-individualistic enterprise. With free markets and other forms of voluntary association, people who can’t agree on what’s worthwhile can go their own ways. But the point [...]
20Jan2009 | Charles Johnson | 2 comments | ContinuedGovernment Education Is Broken? It Just Ain’t So!
Alan Schaeffer is the president of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State. The late Marshall Fritz was the Alliance’s founder and board chairman.
New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert is rightfully worried about American education. He’s bothered that no one else seems worried. In his article “Clueless in America” (April 22), Herbert [...]
The Subprime Crisis Shows that Government Intervenes Too Little in Financial Markets? It Just Aint So!
Start with two assumptions. No. 1: banking and financial markets are inherently unstable. No. 2: government intervention into banking and financial markets can only stabilize (never destabilize). You’ll find it easy to conclude that any period of market instability we experience, like the recent subprime-lending problem, is the market’s fault and that it could have [...]
1Oct2008 | Lawrence H. White | 0 comments | ContinuedFreedom Is Not the Issue? It Just Ain’t So!
James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy, Terrorism and Tyranny, Lost Rights, and other books.
The Friends of Leviathan are once again encouraging people to forget about freedom. In a May op-ed piece in the New York Times, columnist David Brooks announced, “The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role [...]
The Fed Should Inflate to End the Financial Crisis? It Just Ain’t So!
Ivan Pongracic, Jr. teaches economics at Hillsdale College.
The current housing and financial crisis has many people blaming “greed and market forces” for unleashing a panoply of evils on the unsuspecting middle class. This has led to many bad proposals to solve the crisis, such as the April 14 Wall Street Journal op-ed “The Inflation Solution [...]
Raising the Minimum Wage Will Do No Harm? It Just Aint So!
Richard McKenzie is a professor of economics and management in the Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine. He is coauthor (with Dwight Lee) of In Defense of Monopoly: How Market Power Fosters Creative Production, forthcoming this year.
President Bush and the Democratically controlled Congress had all but done it. As this goes [...]
The More College Graduates the Better? It Just Aint So!
Many people assume the country would be better off with more college graduates.
It seems reasonable if not completely obvious. Nations where few people have much formal education tend to be poor, while nations where a lot of people have college and postgraduate degrees are generally quite wealthy. And within the United States it is indisputably [...]
The Trade Deficit Is Debt? It Just Ain’t So!
Writing in the October 4 New York Times, Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz worries about “global imbalances.” Stiglitz’s concerns are revealed in his opening paragraph: “The International Monetary Fund meeting in Singapore last month came at a time of increasing worry about the sustainability of global financial imbalances: For how long can the global economy [...]
1Dec2006 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | Continued-
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Book Reviews
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
