Perspective

The Government Turns on Goldman Sachs

Goldman Sachs took a beating during the spring.  The SEC and a Senate committee were investigating whether it behaved improperly when it participated in a bet against the shaky mortgages fueling the housing boom and allegedly failed to disclose this to buyers of its “synthetic collateralized debt obligations.” The allegation of wrongdoing is an empirical [...]

29Jun2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

“What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear”

I took that title from volume 2, section 4, chapter 6 of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1840). Considering what has been happening legislatively (and not just in the last year-plus), it seems like a good time to revisit Tocqueville’s writing about democratic despotism. He notes that despotism in a constitutional republic would be [...]

20May2010 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued

Obama and the Public

Barack Obama says the people have a growing sense that “something is broken” in Washington. He attributes this to hyper-partisanship and a consequent lack of civility, and thinks public disillusionment can be reversed through better manners, bipartisanship, compromise, and cooperation. But to what end? Presumably greater government management of medical care, finance, education, and energy. [...]

20Apr2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

Murray Rothbard

In 1946 the fledgling Foundation for Economic Education published a pamphlet titled “Roofs or Ceilings: The Current Housing Problem,” a brief against rent control written by two unknown young economists: Milton Friedman and George Stigler. They would go on to win the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976 and 1982, respectively. That’s a remarkable story. [...]

24Mar2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

The Mandated Health Insurance Outrage

The most outrageous aspect of health care “reform” is the insurance mandate: Every individual will have to buy government-defined comprehensive medical coverage (if it isn’t provided by his employer)—or be fined. You must buy it. Who do these politicians think they are? For those who wonder by what authority the government can make us buy [...]

23Feb2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Getting in Deeper

In what the Wall Street Journal calls “a watershed moment for government intervention in the private sector,” the Federal Reserve announced in October that it will regulate executive compensation at all banks so they will not have incentives to take on too much risk. Meanwhile, the Obama administration said it would cut by half (on [...]

5Jan2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

Monsieur Bastiat, Call Your Office

In September I lectured at the Liberty Weekend Dedicated to the Life and Legacy of Frédéric Bastiat, sponsored by the Polish-American Foundation for Economic Research and Education (PAFERE) in Warsaw. Preparing for my visit, I reread Bastiat’s great book The Law. Oh do we need Bastiat today! The Law is the kind of book you [...]

18Nov2009 | Sheldon Richman | 5 comments | Continued

Two Decades Since the Fall

Perspective Two Decades Since the Fall On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall effectively ceased to exist. Remember the sequence: Communist Hungary started letting people pass into Austria and to freedom. Captives of the Soviet bloc left in droves. East Germans, too—thousands of them. The Hungarian government tried to stanch the flow, but the dam [...]

23Oct2009 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

Are We Really all Healthcare Collectivists Now?

“We have to do something about health care.” The scariest word in that sentence is not something. It’s we. The first-person plural form is not merely a convenience, as in “We’re in for a cold winter.” It indicates that decisions about “the healthcare system” should be made collectively, with one decision binding everyone. That’s collectivism. [...]

23Sep2009 | Sheldon Richman | 7 comments | Continued

Human Action as a Work of Art

What can one say briefly about Human Action? When it was being written and people would ask what it was to be about, the answer given among Mises’s students was: Everything. Indeed. From the setting forth of praxeology as the a priori science of human action, to the description of the market’s operation, to the [...]

19Aug2009 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued

Bad Regulation Drives Out Good

In 1969 economist Harold Demsetz identified a flaw in much public policy analysis, the “Nirvana Fallacy”: “The view that now pervades much public policy economics implicitly presents the relevant choice as between an ideal norm and an existing ‘imperfect’ institutional arrangement. This nirvana approach differs considerably from a comparative institution approach in which the relevant choice [...]

17Jun2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Who Watches Our Guardians?

Predictably, the leading inquisitors into the causes of the financial turmoil are themselves among the most culpable: Rep. Barney Frank, Sen. Chris Dodd, and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. AIG got into trouble because it in effect wrote insurance policies (credit default swaps) against the failure of securities based on mortgages, many of which were waiting to blow up when the housing bubble burst. Who created the housing bubble?

21May2009 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

“I, Pencil” Revisited

Leonard Read’s classic essay, “I, Pencil,” is justly celebrated as the best short introduction to the division of labor and undesigned order ever written. But it holds another, largely overlooked lesson as well: “I, Pencil” is an excellent primer in the Austrian approach to capital theory. Read’s pencil describes its family tree, beginning with the [...]

24Apr2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Paul Krugman Flunks Capital Theory

Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is said to have bested commentator George Will over what prolonged the Great Depression during a joint appearance on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” back in November. But all Krugman really did was show that he, as a Keynesian, holds an unrealistic Play-Doh model of [...]

1Apr2009 | Sheldon Richman | 6 comments | Continued

News Flash: FDR Didn’t Restore Prosperity!

The New Deal did not end the Great Depression. This statement will come as no shock to Freeman readers, but it will to the many people who have never encountered it before. Now people are encountering it—in newspaper columns and news-talk shows. Why, after years of being taught that Franklin Roosevelt’s economic intervention saved the [...]

2Mar2009 | Sheldon Richman | 5 comments | Continued

Theory 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 [...]

20Jan2009 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued

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 [...]

1Dec2008 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued
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