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Climate 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 | 1 comment | 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 | 1 comment | 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 | 1 comment | 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 | 0 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 [...]
Old, Bold Futility
In economic analysis and policy formulation, profundity is not to be confused with complexity. And simple logic is not the same as simplicity. Reliance in thought and communication on shortcut slogans and mottos yields not solution but fiasco.
With employment slumping, many would have us believe in a simplistic “bold economic recovery program.” With vast public-works [...]
The Mystique of Hedge Funds
Hedge funds are controversial these days. Though it’s unlikely that the average citizen or the average congressman could say just what hedge funds do, many are certain they must be reined in by additional regulation because they can—and do—cause widespread damage to our financial system. Almost everyone takes it for granted that regulation of some sort [...]
23Oct2009 | Warren C. Gibson | 0 comments | ContinuedThe “I Hate the Poor” Act of 2009
So I was shaving the other day, and the man on the morning talk radio show was on a roll. Cash for Clunkers was being temporarily shut down, or so declared the PR flack in the Department of Waste that administers the program, and Talk Show Guy thought this taught great lessons. “This was a good program! [...]
23Oct2009 | Christopher Westley | 4 comments | ContinuedGovernment Motors
Government Motors
by Michael Heberling
Michael Heberling (mheber01@baker.edu) is president of the Baker College Center for Graduate Studies in Flint, Michigan.
If Washington owns it, it just can’t keep its hands off.
—Senator Lamar Alexander
Twenty-five years ago President Reagan told auto workers in Orion, Michigan, “You’ve demonstrated when the chips are down, what people can do working together freely, [...]
Health Care’s Muddled Incentives
On the topic of health care, what empirical observations are reliable? Unfortunately, many “facts” come freighted with a great deal of ideological baggage. Those skeptical of markets, who favor a large role for government in health care, tend to emphasize statistics that disparage the American healthcare system. For supporters of markets, it is tempting to try to [...]
23Oct2009 | Arnold Kling | 4 comments | ContinuedWhy the Government Fails to Maintain Anything
As the mad scramble to pass President Obama’s stimulus bill reminded us, politicians love to start new government programs. They gain things they can brag about during their reelection campaigns. But there’s little to be gained by maintaining programs somebody else started. No surprise, then, that in budget battles, maintenance tends to be under-funded.
Moreover, as [...]
How “Intellectual Property” Impedes Competition
Any consideration of “intellectual property rights” must start from the understanding that such “rights” undermine genuine property rights and hence are illegitimate in terms of libertarian principle. Real, tangible property rights result from natural scarcity and follow as a matter of course from the attempt to maintain occupancy of physical property that cannot be possessed [...]
23Sep2009 | Kevin Carson | 7 comments | Continued-
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Book Reviews
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
