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Blowing Bubbles: Getting Ready for the Next Bust

Imagine you are a private in the army. Your sergeant orders you to dig a hole. When you finish, the sergeant is horrified to find that you have dug a hole. He dresses you down and then orders you to dig another hole. Insane? Welcome to today’s world of American banking. Over the course of [...]

4Jan2012 | Richard W. Fulmer | 16 comments | Continued

Tough on Immigration Is Tough on Economic Growth

Not to be outdone by Arizona’s tough immigration law of 2010, Alabama and Georgia legislators passed their own immigration bills in 2011. The bills received a great deal of media attention because they were widely touted as good for growth and job creation, and were harsher on illegal immigrants than Arizona’s law. In a New [...]

4Jan2012 | Scott Beaulier | 21 comments | Continued

The Euro: The Folly of Political Currency

The financial markets continue to surge and collapse based on the latest news from Europe. As of this writing, the big events are Slovakia’s unwillingness to contribute to a bailout fund and the failure of Dexia, a French-Belgian bank with assets of almost $700 billion. As the sovereign debt crisis has intensified in the last [...]

4Jan2012 | Robert P. Murphy | 3 comments | Continued

Going to Graceland

A recent trip to Memphis took me to Elvis Presley’s famed home, Graceland. Touring Presley’s mansion and its grounds is fascinating for fans of his music, and the Presley estate has done a marvelous job in capturing his music and life. But visiting Graceland mostly interested me as an economist. Walking through the home of [...]

4Jan2012 | Andrew P. Morriss | 9 comments | Continued

Taxi Regulation and the Failures of Progressivism

As the American people head into another election year some will be puzzled by the rise and the staying power of Progressive ideals—according to which government manages the private economy supposedly for the social welfare. But in truth they’ve been operating at the local level for more than a century. Overestimating the power of Progressive [...]

4Jan2012 | Samuel R. Staley | 2 comments | Continued

Government Is No Friend of the Poor

You’ve heard it all too many times to count, I suspect. Apologists for big government—the New York Times’s Paul Krugman and Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson being good recent examples—are convinced there’s just no good alternative to government social services. Without the government, people will go hungry. They’ll die in the streets. We’ll lapse back into [...]

4Jan2012 | Gary Chartier | 22 comments | Continued

State-Mandated Thinking

Is this statement true? “If SpongeBob SquarePants is the mayor of Minneapolis, then Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo.” It is. On the other hand, this is not: “If Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo, then Spongebob Squarepants is the Mayor of Minneapolis.” Confused? Welcome to our government-school curricula. In the July/August 2011 issue of [...]

4Jan2012 | Peter McAllister | 6 comments | Continued

The Twisted Tree of Progressivism

Sorting out the Progressive movement and its constituent ideologies can be difficult in that the very term “progressive” is burdened with contested meanings. Rather than work along lines agreeable to presently out-of-office politicians hoping to regain power by denouncing long-dead Progressives, we begin with some deep background. One portent of Progressivism is found in the [...]

30Nov2011 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 24 comments | Continued

Scientism and the Great Power Nexus

President Obama wants to create jobs. His political life depends on it. So the President recently used the bully pulpit to propose a “jobs” bill that would include heavy spending on infrastructure. Journalists wanted to know what the bill would do. They turned to economists. These experts, armed with the most sophisticated methods available, gave [...]

30Nov2011 | Max Borders | 5 comments | Continued

The Age of the Busybody

Busybodies. In an earlier, gentler time, every neighborhood had one. Predominantly but not exclusively female in those days, the local busybody was recognized with ease. Although the verb was mercifully unknown, she micromanaged all PTA meetings, gatherings, sales, and affairs whether or not she was chairman or even occupied a seat on the governing board. [...]

30Nov2011 | Ridgway K. Foley Jr. | 0 comments | Continued

A Return to Gold?

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. . . . Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society. . . .The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the [...]

30Nov2011 | and and John L. Chapman | 13 comments | Continued

Money Is Not Speech

“The Supreme Court said that money equals speech!” Proponents of campaign finance regulation have thrown this trope around freely since 2010’s landmark Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. Fortunately, the Court never actually made such an absurd equation. It would be hard to take the Court seriously if it had. But [...]

30Nov2011 | Michael Cummins | 2 comments | Continued

The Family Stone: Cavemen, Trade, and Comparative Advantage

Imagine a Stone Age family: Papa Stone, Mama Stone, and their two little pebbles. Suppose that, as befits pre-women’s-lib Neanderthals, Papa Stone is initially more competent at every prehistoric survival skill: hunting, fishing, nut-and-berry gathering, firebuilding, tool-making. Despite his superior talents, it does not make sense for other family members to sit around waiting for him to [...]

30Nov2011 | Richard W. Fulmer | 1 comment | Continued

Unemployment: What’s To Be Done?

In Part 1 I outlined natural unemployment, government-caused unemployment, and the attempts to measure these. We saw how ambiguous and subjective some of the concepts of unemployment are and how the government, specifically the Federal Reserve, is charged with managing it. Now we turn to current conditions and what can be done about them. There [...]

30Nov2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 6 comments | Continued

The Importance of Failure

In today’s society failure has become something to fear, avoid, and therefore prevent at all costs. Whether it is unemployment compensation, farm subsidies, or bailouts for failing companies, the world seems to view failure as having no redeeming social value. If success is all good and failure is all bad, then it seems as though [...]

26Oct2011 | and and Steven Horwitz | 11 comments | Continued

Taxation Is the Lifeblood of the State

The cliffhanger debate over whether or not to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling threw U.S. fiscal policy into brighter relief than it has been in recent memory. Suddenly people were calling for significant cuts in government spending in the face of a rapidly growing national debt. As often happens, calls for cuts in government [...]

26Oct2011 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 4 comments | Continued

“Find Out What the People Want”: The Russell Conwell Story

“There is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings. . . .” Those words come, interestingly enough, from what is almost certainly the most successful charitable fundraising speech ever delivered. It was given over 6,000 times, provided almost 1,700 young people with the opportunity to [...]

26Oct2011 | Harold B. Jones Jr. | 0 comments | Continued
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