Departments
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 | ContinuedBook Reviews – June 2008
David’s Hammer: The Case for an Activist Judiciary by Clint Bolick Cato Institute • 2007 • 177 pages • $11.95 paperback Reviewed by George C. Leef In recent years “judicial activism” has been assailed from both ends of the political spectrum. Conservatives complain about “liberal” activism when courts strike down laws they favor, and “liberals” [...]
1Jun2008 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedGovernment 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 | ContinuedCoercion 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 | ContinuedBook Reviews – 2008/5
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution by Kevin R. C. Gutzman Regnery • 2007 • 258 pages • $19.95 paperback Reviewed by J. H. Huebert Conservative commentators often tell us that if only we would get back to the Constitution as it was understood, say, 100 years ago, all would be well with our [...]
1May2008 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedThe State Is Morally Hazardous To Your Health
It’s never been more important for advocates of individual liberty to emphasize that what is failing today is not the free market but the state. To claim otherwise is to ignore generations of pervasive and deep-seated privilege through government interference with the marketplace. Intentions are irrelevant. The laws of economics proceed whether those who interfere [...]
1May2008 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedGovernment 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 | ContinuedAre the Voters Qualified to Pick a President?
The big political buzz is over whether John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama are qualified to be president. The voters are expected to decide, but are they qualified to do that? How would voters know who is up to this job? They might try to make a judgment on the basis of character. But [...]
1Apr2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedConsumption 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 | ContinuedBook Reviews – April 2008
- Globalization by Donald J. Boudreaux Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
- Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement by Brian Doherty Reviewed by Bettina Bien Greaves
- Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie by Clayton E. Cramer Reviewed by George C. Leef
- The European Economy Since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond by Barry Eichengreen Reviewed by Waldemar Ingdahl
An Unstimulating Idea
“It’s like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end.” That’s how George Mason University economist Russell Roberts describes the logic—rather, illogic—of the economic “stimulus” proposals that everyone and his uncle have been proposing. If we needed further demonstration of the folly that is [...]
1Mar2008 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedHealth 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 | ContinuedBook Reviews – March 2008
- Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
by Bryan Caplan Reviewed by Dwight Lee - The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World
1Mar2008 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | Continued
A Matter of Priorities
‘Tis the political season, which means the season to bash immigrants. This goes especially for so-called “illegal aliens,” that is, residents without government papers. (As if that’s a big deal.) Candidates and others who are set on securing the Mexican border—the Canadian border seems of less concern—and expelling those who had the audacity to come [...]
1Jan2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedThe 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 | ContinuedCapital Letters
David Hume and Reason In the very title of his article in The Freeman of October 2007, Frank van Dun asks, “Can We Be Free If Reason Is the Slave of the Passions?” His article is uncommonly long and gauzy for a Freeman piece; and his citations to David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature are [...]
1Jan2008 | Frank van Dun | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – January 2008
- The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care
by David Gratzer Reviewed by Jane M. Orient
- Self-Determination: The Other Path for Native Americans
Edited by Terry L. Anderson, Bruce L. Benson, and Thomas F. Flanagan Reviewed by William L. Anderson, Jr.
- The Wal-Mart Revolution
by Richard Vedder and Wendell Cox Reviewed by George Leef - On the Wealth of Nations
by P.J. O’Rourke Reviewed by Raymond J. Keating
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