It Just Ain't So
Raising the Minimum Wage Will Discourage Migration? It Just Aint So!
In “Raise Wages, Not Walls,” an op-ed in the July 25 New York Times, Michael Dukakis and Daniel Mitchell make a proposal that is breathtaking in its misunderstanding of basic economics. After showing problems with the various congressional proposals to limit illegal immigration, they give their own solution: increase the minimum wage. They write, “If [...]
1Nov2006 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | ContinuedOnly the Rich Are Getting Richer? It Just Ain’t So!
“In an era when the rich are the only income group getting richer,” begins an article in the April 13 Washington Post. (Blaine Harden, “As the Rich Ride In, Many Are Priced Out of Homes on the Range.”) But in this one 13-word statement, versions of which have become so common in conversations and newspaper [...]
1Aug2006 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | ContinuedNothing to Learn from the Antifederalists? It Just Ain’t So!
Joseph Stromberg is a historian and freelance writer.
According to Paul Greenberg, writing in the Washington Times in late January, the dreaded Antifederalists and their Articles of Confederation are making a comeback. In particular, these miscreants dare to question executive power. He writes with patriotic horror—a horror that assumes as self-evident a partisan reading of American [...]
We Need Medical Rationing? It Just Ain’t So!
In a recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times (“A Health Care Prescription that’s Hard to Swallow,” January 30, 2006), Henry Aaron, a well-known health economist at the Brookings Institution, made the following argument:
Spending on health care in the United States is rising as a percent of GDP and could go from its current 16 [...]
Ending Farm Subsidies Wouldn’t Help the Third World? It Just Aint So!
Talks by the 146 members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) collapsed last fall over trade-liberalization disputes between rich and poor countries. The biggest bone of contention was the extent to which the “first world”—mainly Europe, the United States, and Japan—were willing to slash their huge farm subsidies. More than 20 developing countries, including Brazil, [...]
1Apr2004 | E.C. Pasour Jr. | 0 comments | ContinuedDecency Requires a Minimum-Wage Law? It Just Ain’t So!
The libertarian cliché that “at least the Republicans are right on economic policies” suffered another setback on the August 11, 2003, Los Angeles Times op-ed page, where Republican Douglas MacKinnon argues that anyone who cares about the poor should be ashamed of the failure of the Senate to raise the minimum wage. His essay is [...]
1Mar2004 | Aeon J. Skoble | 0 comments | ContinuedThe State Is the Source of Rights? It Just Ain’t So!
In 1776 a reliable indicator of an American’s opinion of the ideas expressed in the Declaration of Independence was his attitude toward the 1649 execution of England’s King Charles I. Liberals, who shared Jefferson’s principles, believed Charles to have been a tyrant and hence most deserving of losing his head. Conservatives, resisting the call to [...]
1Dec2003 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | ContinuedBanning Handguns Would Save Lives? It Just Aint So!
A Los Angeles Times opinion piece by Jennifer Price last February, “Gun Lobby’s Perfect Aim,” asks: why not ban handguns? She was writing in anger and sorrow over the murder of her brother David and his wife, by the wife’s mother.
Emotion is a poor basis for public policy, and the essay demonstrates a poor grasp [...]
New Laws Will Protect Americans from Snipers? It Just Aint So!
The handcuffs had barely been slapped on the two Maryland sniper suspects—John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo—before the so-called liberals began invoking their crimes as a pretext to undermine the rights of all Americans. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, writing on October 31, 2002, invoked federal crime statistics indicating that “the number of [...]
1Feb2003 | James Bovard | 0 comments | ContinuedEnron and Argentina Are Examples of Market Failure? It Just Aint So!
In the eyes of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, nearly everything that goes wrong in the world is caused by the fact that government is not big and powerful enough. In a mid-December 2001 column he blamed both the bankruptcy of Enron and the collapse of the Argentine economy on deregulation. But, as is [...]
1May2002 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 0 comments | ContinuedRising Oil Prices Create Inflation? It Just Ain’t So!
With oil prices rising rapidly and the euro and the Australian dollar declining sharply (to name only two currencies to fall persistently), it appears that a rough road is ahead for the world’s economies. Perhaps the biggest concern for those countries which import oil is that a new wave of inflation will sweep over them. [...]
1Apr2001 | Christopher Lingle | 0 comments | ContinuedKyoto Protocol’s Death Is a Tragedy? It Just Aint So!
Last November was a bad month for the Greens. While the battle to save their most important political leader raged in Tallahassee, the battle to resurrect their most important international initiative raged in The Hague. There, representatives from 180 nations fought desperately to save the Kyoto Protocol—the 1997 global-warming treaty—from political oblivion. The meeting in [...]
1Mar2001 | Jerry Taylor | 0 comments | ContinuedFederal Control of Education Needed? It Just Aint So!
The New York Times recently apologized to readers for its cavalier treatment of the facts in the Wen Ho Lee case. If that editorial failure merited an apology, the Times should be refunding readers’ money for publishing Leon Botstein’s September 19 op-ed on education.
Botstein claims that local control is causing our public-school problems and that [...]
Antitrust Protects Competition? It Just Ain’t So!
Conservative William Safire’s column “The Curse of Bigness” (New York Times, December 13, 1999) is dedicated to “exploding myths” allegedly spread by MCI, WorldCom, Sprint, and other large firms seeking government approval for prospective mergers that will serve to magnify their market power. Satire opens innocuously enough with the comfortable platitude that “Competition is the [...]
1Apr2000 | Joseph T. Salerno | 0 comments | ContinuedMore Public Investment Needed? It Just Ain’t So!
It must be something in the water. Robert Kuttner is the latest writer from the Boston suburbs to complain that Americans don’t spend enough of their hard-earned money on “public investment.” In a column that the Washington Post titled “Public Parsimony, Private Affluence” (November 29, 1999), Kuttner concluded that “paradoxically, a period of unprecedented private [...]
1Mar2000 | David Boaz | 0 comments | ContinuedHurricanes Are Creative Destruction? It Just Ain’t So!
My employer, Loyola College, is a Jesuit institution and, as such, encourages its students to participate in myriad community-service programs. In teaching introductory economics, I propose on the first day of class a marriage of economic education and community service. I offer to give students aluminum baseball bats with which they will walk through the [...]
1Feb2000 | Thomas J. DiLorenzo | 0 comments | ContinuedWe Need a Global Fed? It Just Ain’t So!
Some economic pundits see every instance of economic disorder as proof of the defects of capitalism and of the need for more extensive government regulation of the economy. It never seems to cross their minds that government regulations might even destabilize markets. A recent example of such thinking comes from Jeffrey E. Garten, dean of [...]
1Feb1999 | George A. Selgin | 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
