Departments
Greenspan 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 | ContinuedTheory and Crisis
What might be even more distressing than the current buildup of the corporate state in response to the supposed economic crisis is the way some self-styled advocates of the free market are willing to cast aside the economic theory they once claimed to embrace.
If you are a glutton for cable news-talk shows, you know it’s [...]
Bailing Out Statism
The key to understanding the saga of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the newly nationalized twin government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that dominate home financing—is this:
They were created—intentionally—to distort the housing and mortgage markets. That is, government planners were not content to let voluntary exchange and spontaneous market forces configure those industries unmolested. So—holding the taxpayers hostage—they intervened.
Make [...]
The Free Market Is Failing? It Just Aint So!
There is no doubt the U.S. economy has hit a rough patch over the last several months. As is often the case when economic problems make headlines, pundits rush to declare that capitalism is “in trouble,” or “is ailing” or even “has failed.” This reaction to economic bad news is as old as capitalism itself. [...]
1Dec2008 | Steven Horwitz | 5 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – December 2008
Is the Welfare State Justified?
by Daniel Shapiro
Cambridge University Press • 2007 • 309 pages • $80.00 hardcover; $27.99 paperback
Reviewed by George C. Leef
Americans have lived with the welfare state for so long—more than 70 years—that for most, it is simply a fact of life. Asking whether it is justified would seem about as pointless as [...]
Paternalist Nudges
Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein and University of Chicago economics professor Richard Thaler are self-proclaimed “libertarian paternalists” (http://tinyurl.com/6xy6l4). Contradiction in terms? They think not. According to their approach, “[G]overnments try to move people in good directions without imposing penalties, mandates or bans.” The part about “moving people in good directions” is the paternalism. The part [...]
1Nov2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 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 [...]
Hubris in the First Degree
“I will commit two billion dollars each year on clean-coal research and development. We will build the demonstration plants, refine the techniques and equipment, and make clean coal a reality.”
That’s what John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, said back on June 18 in Springfield, Missouri. My first reaction was this: “That’s mighty generous of Senator [...]
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 | ContinuedCapital Letters
Mistreating the Constitution?
If recent items in The Freeman are any indication, its writers take a rather dim view of the Constitution and the Framers thereof. While I couldn’t agree more regarding the people who wrote our federal compact (with a few exceptions), I must take issue with how the magazine treats the Constitution itself.
Sheldon Richman [...]
The “Stable Bulwark of Our Liberties”
The U.S. Supreme Court in June struck a blow for the separation of powers and dealt the Bush administration a big setback by ruling that suspects held without charge at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to contest their imprisonment under the doctrine of habeas corpus.
Simply put, the Court held that the government may not [...]
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 role [...]
Capital Letters
Are Corporations Islands of “Calculational Chaos”?
According to Kevin Carson (“Hierarchy or the Market,” The Freeman, April 2008), a private business corporation is in effect “an island of calculational chaos in the market economy.” . . . Carson writes, “Those at the top make decisions concerning a production process about which they likely know as little [...]
Hands Off “Windfall” Profits
You don’t have to like the oil companies to reject the windfall-profits tax. All you have to know is that if you tax something, you’ll get less of it. No one can seriously dispute this piece of common sense. That leaves the strong suspicion that the motive for the tax is punitive: those companies are [...]
1Jul2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedThe 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 [...]
Government Schools and the Housing Mess
The Law of Unintended Consequences is a fascinating thing. You can never be entirely sure what the second-, third-, etc.- order effects of any action will be. This is especially so with government policy because centralized decision-making can do so much damage to so many people. That ought to humble the politicians and bureaucrats, but [...]
1Jun2008 | Sheldon Richman | 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
