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 [...]

Book Reviews – December 2007

• Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World
  
  by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu Reviewed by Andrew P. Morriss
  
• Econospinning: How to Read Between the Lines When the Media Manipulate the Numbers
  by Gene Epstein Reviewed by Joseph Coletti
  
• The Entrepreneurial Imperative: How Americas Economic Miracle Will Reshape the World (and Change Your Life)
  by Carl J. Schramm Reviewed by Frederic Sautet
• The Green Wave: Environmentalism and Its Consequences
  by Bonner Cohen Reviewed by George C. Leef
  

Pundit in Wonderland

In one of those boilerplate articles about the deteriorating American middle class, Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson last September pointed out that a new Pew Research Center survey revealed that an increasing number of people think we live in a country divided into “haves” and “have-nots” and that more people now put themselves in the [...]

Capital Letters

Were Missionaries Like Psychiatrists? To the Editor: People have misunderstood and maligned Christians for two millennia, but goodness, must Dr. Szasz compare us to coercive quacks? He writes in The Freeman’s July/August 2007 issue: “Consider this parallel between psychiatry and missionary Christianity. The heathen savage does not suffer from lack of insight into the divinity [...]

Why Cut Taxes?

Judging by the popping corks at the White House, taxes are cut to increase government revenues so the budget deficit can be shrunk without reducing government spending. Tax cuts are good, but this reason leaves me cold. President Bush announced recently that “This economy is growing, federal taxes are rising, and we’re cutting the federal [...]

Index for 2005

A complete index to The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, volume 55, January-December, 2005.

We’re Running Out of Oil?

The rise in gasoline prices in the United States has become a political issue. Each side panders to its own constituency with the most extreme arguments and factoids, leaving precious little in the middle ground of common sense. Take, for example, the March op-ed in the Los Angeles Times by Paul Roberts, “Say Bye-Bye to [...]

Whose Airwaves Are They?

The heat is being turned up on radio stations for broadcasting indecent material. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has fined Clear Channel Communications nearly half a million dollars for broadcasting several minutes of lewd remarks by radio star Howard Stern back in April. Clear Channel has since stopped carrying the program on its six stations. [...]