It Just Ain’t So

Government Education Is Broken?

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), [...]

1Nov2008 | and and Alan Schaeffer | 5 comments | Continued

The Subprime Crisis Shows that Government Intervenes Too Little in Financial Markets?

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 | Continued

Freedom 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 [...]

1Sep2008 | James Bovard | 0 comments | Continued

The Fed Should Inflate to End the Financial Crisis?

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 to the Housing Mess” by John Makin, [...]

1Jul2008 | Ivan Pongracic Jr. | 1 comment | Continued

Coercion Is the Only Way to Ensure Health?

Aeon J. Skoble is a professor of philosophy and chair of the philosophy department at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. In his April 11 New York Times column, economist Paul Krugman discusses the minor trouble then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton got into when an anecdote she told about a woman who died because she didn’t have [...]

1Jun2008 | Aeon J. Skoble | 1 comment | Continued

Government Intervention Is Needed to Solve the Housing Crisis?

In his March 18, 2008, column in the New York Times, David Brooks addresses the ongoing problems in the housing industry and concludes that “In normal times, the free market works well. But in a crisis like this one, few are willing to sit back and let the market find its own equilibrium.” Instead, Brooks [...]

1May2008 | Steven Horwitz | 3 comments | Continued

Consumption Must Be Curtailed to Sustain the Human Race?

Jared Diamond, in a January 2 op-ed in the New York Times, argues for a political solution to what he sees as a looming “consumption crisis” facing humanity. He notes that the current consumption of many resources, such as oil and metals, is roughly 32 times higher in the developed than in the developing world [...]

1Apr2008 | Gene Callahan | 1 comment | Continued

Health Care Is Worse Here than Elsewhere?

In the November 13, 2007, Washington Post, columnist Eugene Robinson attacked former Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani’s claim that health care is better in the United States than in countries with socialized medicine. Robinson offers evidence that socialized medicine in various industrialized countries isn’t much worse, and is sometimes better, than U.S. health care, but [...]

1Mar2008 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | Continued

The Fed Didn’t Bail Out Wall Street?

In his New York Times column (“It’s Monetary Policy, Not a Morality Play,” September 9, 2007), Tyler Cowen decried the clichéd pattern of casting all financial stories into “simple moral narratives.” Although many commentators have questioned the Fed’s handling of the credit crunch last August and September, Cowen sees no hanky-panky: Talk of a bailout [...]

1Jan2008 | Robert P. Murphy | 4 comments | Continued

Uneven Information Causes Market Failure?

In a famous 1970 paper, economics Nobel Laureate George Akerlof used the market for used cars to show how differences in information between buyers and sellers (“asymmetric information”) could lead a market to shrink or collapse entirely. A large variety of markets have been said to fail because of asymmetric information, from all different types [...]

1Dec2007 | Joshua C. Hall | 0 comments | Continued

Pharmaceutical Profits and Health Are Inconsistent?

In a critical review of Richard Epstein’s book Overdose: How Excessive Government Regulation Stifles Pharmaceutical Innovation, Arnold Relman (The New Republic, July 30) criticizes drug companies for their hypocrisy. Contrasting the companies’ message to stockholders with their message to the larger world, he quotes Pfizer President Jeffrey Kindler’s statement that his goal is “to create [...]

1Nov2007 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | Continued

Milton Friedman Is to Blame for Unsafe Food?

There is a “food safety crisis” in America and Milton Friedman is to blame, Princeton University economist Paul Krugman wrote on the New York Times op-ed page May 21. Friedman is responsible, Krugman wrote, because he legitimized a “sickening ideology” that rejects “even the most compelling” cases for government regulation of business. Krugman’s “crisis” stems [...]

1Oct2007 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 3 comments | Continued

Government Is Better than the Market at Producing Human Capital?

Invoking the Founding Fathers is always risky. We typically use the term as an amalgamation, as in “the Founders believed X.” But as a reading of even one semi-serious history of the American founding will show, their beliefs were divergent and contentious. Many libertarians employ the term “Founders” as if to provide a degree of [...]

1Sep2007 | Jude Blanchette | 0 comments | Continued

Something Besides Money Growth Causes Inflation?

Howard Baetjer, Jr., is a lecturer in economics at Towson University. Some economic phenomena can result from a variety of causes. A temporary increase in unemployment, for example, might be caused by a sudden, disruptive change in production technology, or in trade patterns, or in labor or tax laws; or it could be caused by [...]

1Jul2007 | Howard Baetjer Jr. | 7 comments | Continued

We Have Enough Globalization?

Jude Blanchette is a freelance writer living in Shanghai. The debate over free trade is, and has been for over 200 years, quite contentious. In reading over the historical debates, it often seems as if no ground has been made by the advocates of a global, borderless economy. Indeed, this is what makes reading Adam [...]

1Jun2007 | Jude Blanchette | 0 comments | Continued

The Stock Market Is a Swindle?

Jude Blanchette is a freelance writer living in China. Michael Kinsley, founding editor of the online magazine Slate, columnist for the Washington Post, and American editor of the Guardian (UK), is a smart guy. His columns are often witty and incisive. Even where Kinsley is wrong (and he often is) he provides the reader a [...]

1Apr2007 | Jude Blanchette | 0 comments | Continued

Raising the Minimum Wage Will Do No Harm?

President Bush and the Democratically controlled Congress had all but done it. As this goes to press, they are on the verge of hiking the federal minimum wage, which has not budged since 1997. The minimum wage will have risen by 70 cents, or to $5.85, an hour by the time these words are read. [...]

1Mar2007 | Richard B. McKenzie | 3 comments | Continued
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