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“We Want to be Regulated”
Efforts in Washington to write a major climate-change law are causing some Bootlegger/Baptist coalitions to fall apart and new ones to emerge. In late September Exelon Corporation, a major electric utility, followed industry partners Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and PNM when it resigned from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber opposed the Waxman-Markey [...]
5Jan2010 | Bruce Yandle | 3 comments | ContinuedDeflation: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
During the current recession a number of commentators have made various comparisons to the Great Depression, mostly because of the dramatic decline in the stock market and ongoing troubles in the financial industry. When oil prices also began a dramatic decline in the autumn of 2008, pulling the overall consumer price level downward for the [...]
5Jan2010 | Steven Horwitz | 55 comments | ContinuedThe Long and Short of Short Selling
Short selling is a little-understood, much-maligned tactic by which traders can profit from their belief that a company’s stock is overvalued.
Following the financial problems of the last two years, short selling has come under fire, with new or revived regulations proposed to curb the practice. It is unpatriotic, destructive, and destabilizing, say the critics. Such [...]
Walmart’s Bottom Line
Walmart is one of the world’s largest, most successful, and most vilified corporations. It was ranked number four in the Fortune 500 from 1995 through 1998, reached number one in 2002 and stayed there until 2009, when it fell behind Exxon Mobil. It’s also the only firm in the top four of the Fortune 500 [...]
5Jan2010 | Art Carden | 14 comments | ContinuedFreedom in America: Is the Glass Half-full or Half-empty?
It is an age-old question of perception. Show a person a glass with some liquid in it and ask, “Is it half-full or half-empty?”
The importance of the answer depends on the interests of the person asking the question. If you owned a restaurant and wanted to skimp on the wine, you would rather your customers [...]
How Dense Can They Get?
When it comes to power, energy density is the key. Solar power, wind power, and ethanol are so expensive because they are derived from very diffuse energy sources. It takes a lot of energy collectors such as solar cells, wind turbines, or corn stalks covering many square miles to produce the same amount of power [...]
5Jan2010 | Richard W. Fulmer | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Green-Economy Mirage
If you got an email offering you the chance to invest in a business that would create new profitable industries, employ millions of people, reduce energy consumption without reducing quality of life, and improve environmental quality, would you be skeptical? And if the email went on to claim that the technologies to do all this [...]
5Jan2010 | Andrew P. Morriss | 7 comments | ContinuedClimate Change in the Great American Desert
President Obama’s science adviser, Dr. John Holdren, a Harvard physicist and persistent global-warming alarmist, made the news recently with a stunning and bold idea on how to halt the imminent danger posed by global warming—sorry, global climate change. Holdren has discussed the feasibility of geoengineering, a deliberate attempt at manmade climate change to counteract dreaded [...]
18Nov2009 | Tyler Watts | 0 comments | ContinuedHow to End Mexico’s Deadly Drug War
Albert Einstein declared, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” He wasn’t describing the federal government’s nearly century-long war on drugs but he might as well have been.
Despite ample lip-service for “hope” and “change,” the Obama administration’s cynical response to the escalating drug prohibition-related violence [...]
The Depression You’ve Never Heard Of: 1920-1921
When it comes to diagnosing the causes of the Great Depression and prescribing cures for our present recession, the pundits and economists from the biggest schools typically argue about two different types of intervention. Big-government Keynesians, such as Paul Krugman, argue for massive fiscal stimulus—that is, huge budget deficits—to fill the gap in aggregate demand. [...]
18Nov2009 | Robert P. Murphy | 11 comments | ContinuedFinancial Crises and the Federal Reserve’s Punch Bowl
Why did the U.S. financial system nearly collapse last year? People blame Wall Street’s excessive greed and risk-taking. But without easy money, the massive risk-taking could not have happened.
To be sure, financial firms leveraged up—that is, they did a lot of business with borrowed money. That juiced up revenues and bonuses in the boom—and exacerbated [...]
Why Those Who Value Liberty Should Rejoice: Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize
Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is also one of the most iconoclastic thinkers to win it. (She shared it with Oliver Williamson.) Professor Ostrom’s work focuses on the mechanisms of self-governance that operate in different societies. Her intellectual curiosity led her to study local public economies—in [...]
18Nov2009 | Peter J. Boettke | 4 comments | ContinuedCash for Clunkers Was a Loser
President Obama’s Cash for Clunkers program, inspired by the Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act, ended August 25, 2009. As I drove through a major shopping area that day, I passed a large and highly successful Toyota dealer. Just past the sparkling showroom and sparsely populated lot of new cars, “clunkers” sat in a [...]
18Nov2009 | Bruce Yandle | 3 comments | ContinuedPolitical Bankruptcies: How Chrysler and GM Have Changed the Rules of the Game
The topic of corporate bankruptcy law scarcely titillates the imagination of ordinary citizens, even those with a deep interest in constitutional and public affairs. Harried people treat bankruptcy almost dismissively as a useful way of winding up firms that cannot keep their financial heads above water. In practice they sense rightly that the corporate bankruptcy [...]
18Nov2009 | Richard A. Epstein | 3 comments | ContinuedArt Needs No State Subsidies
It’s feeding time again, and artists and cultural groups are lining up at the trough. The bailout package approved by Congress in February threw another $50 million at the arts. For the better part of the past year, music impresario Quincy Jones beseeched Barack Obama to add a secretary of arts to his cabinet. In [...]
23Oct2009 | Bruce Edward Walker | 1 comment | ContinuedStealth Expansion of Government Power
The government of the United States spent the year debating major new undertakings, ranging from health care to climate change to energy development to tax reform. Yet a far more fundamental shift, in the form of a rapid and pervasive expansion of government power over the private sector of the economy, has been going on [...]
23Oct2009 | Murray Weidenbaum | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Great Writ Then and Now
The Great Writ Then and Now
by Wendy McElroy
Wendy McElroy (wendy@wendymcelroy.com) is an author, the editor of ifeminists.com, and a research fellow for the Independent Institute in Oakland, California.
Habeas corpus is a rarely invoked legal writ, or document, widely considered to be the cornerstone of individual liberty. Also known as The Great Writ, habeas corpus (ad [...]
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