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The Battle to Save American Street Vending

Larry Miller and Stanley Hambrick are classic American entrepreneurs. Both men started their businesses from scratch, and for more than 20 years they’ve been living their American Dreams. They each own and operate popular vending stands outside Turner Field in Atlanta, serving baseball fans with tasty snacks, fully licensed Braves merchandise, parody shirts, and other [...]

26Oct2011 | Bob Ewing | 11 comments | Continued

Quantitative Easing Forever?

Despite assertions that it has ended its policy of quantitative easing (QE), the Fed is unlikely to be able to do so until it also ends its zero-interest-rate policy (ZIRP). This deadly policy duo has had terrible consequences for the American economy and every country using U.S. dollars. It is as though the Fed were [...]

26Oct2011 | Christopher Lingle | 1 comment | Continued

The Infrastructure Delusion: Getting Nowhere Faster

Infrastructure does not an economy make. Highways and railroads, airports and seaports, communications towers and fiber-optic cables are essential for the flow of commerce, but it is the people, goods, and information moving over and through this infrastructure that are the heart of an economy. Overinvestment in roads, bridges, and airports means underinvestment in the [...]

26Oct2011 | Richard W. Fulmer | 12 comments | Continued

Unemployment: What Is It?

Unemployment has regained center stage now that the debt crisis has receded from that position, at least for a time. Unless things change dramatically over the next year unemployment will be the number one issue in the forthcoming presidential election. Hardly any proposal will escape being labeled “job-killing” or “job-creating” or both. To begin with [...]

26Oct2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 2 comments | Continued

The Individual and the Community

Last May sociologist Amitai Etzioni participated in a debate hosted by the Cato Institute in which he argued against the classical-liberal theory as being too atomistic, excessively concerned with selfish individualism, and neglectful of the importance of community. He’s been making this point for 20 years, which is strange for two reasons: First, it isn’t [...]

26Oct2011 | Aeon J. Skoble | 1 comment | Continued

Eugenics: Progressivism’s Ultimate Social Engineering

According to the received account of the Progressive Era, an enlightened government swept in and regulated markets for goods, labor, and capital, thereby protecting the hapless masses from the vicissitudes of unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism. The Progressives had faith that experts would rise above self-interest and implement wise plans to create a great society. The resulting [...]

21Sep2011 | and and Art Carden | 21 comments | Continued

Wolf Heads and Carbon Credits

Abraham Lincoln, in vivid recollections from early childhood, described the cashing of bounty for freshly severed wolf heads on the steps of an Indiana courthouse. In 1816 killing wolves at public expense was seen as an obvious necessity and probably represented a genuine emotional reassurance to the intrepid settlers of the era. Though it places [...]

21Sep2011 | Paul Schwennesen | 4 comments | Continued

Walter Lippmann: The Impossibilities of Social Planning

At the beginning of the twentieth century, observed historian A. J. P. Taylor, a law-abiding Englishman’s conscious relations with the government were limited to his contacts with the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked, and if he wanted to travel abroad he could do so without [...]

21Sep2011 | Harold B. Jones Jr. | 2 comments | Continued

Contradicting Keynes: Bernanke’s Debt Default Scare

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s remarks last summer about the debt limit and risk of default amounted to a stunning contradiction of Keynes and Keynesian economics. But few seem to have noticed. In response to questions by U.S. Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), Bernanke joined in the chorus of those predicting skyrocketing interest rates in the [...]

21Sep2011 | James C. W. Ahiakpor | 1 comment | Continued

Tyranny Afoot: Arthur Koestler’s Communist Chronicles

“You want to stifle the Republic in blood. How long must the footsteps of freedom be gravestones? Tyranny is afoot; she has torn her veil, she carries her head high, she treads over our dead bodies.” —Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon Perhaps no author better chronicled the disastrous, soul-crushing European political experiments of the middle [...]

21Sep2011 | Bruce Edward Walker | 2 comments | Continued

Making Whistle-Blowing Pay

The federal bureaucracies are hard at work churning out rules to implement the Dodd-Frank financial “reform” act. In May the Securities and Exchange Commission announced rules for its new whistleblower program, which rewards individuals who provide the agency with “high-quality tips that lead to successful enforcement acts.” The minimum amount of recovered funds that can [...]

21Sep2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 2 comments | Continued

The Gilded Age: A Modest Revision

Mark Twain named the decades after 1865 the “Gilded Age,” and Progressive historian Vernon Louis Parrington sketched them in some detail in 1927. For Parrington (Main Currents in American Thought, volume 3), the Gilded Age was a “Great Barbecue” of continuous government largesse and State-assisted capital accumulation under a very simple philosophy: “[P]reemption [of land] meant exploitation [...]

21Sep2011 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 4 comments | Continued

A Simple Solution

There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong. —H. L. Mencken I have devised a simple plan for improving Americans’ health by drastically reducing everyone’s weight, thereby significantly increasing longevity and reducing medical costs. All we need to do is revalue the pound. Instead of a pound being [...]

24Aug2011 | Richard W. Fulmer | 1 comment | Continued

The Many Monopolies

We libertarians defend economic freedom, not big business. We advocate free markets, not the corporate economy. And what would freed markets look like? Nothing like the controlled markets we have today. But how often do we hear mass unemployment, financial crisis, ecological catastrophe, and the economic status quo attributed to the voraciousness of “unfettered free [...]

24Aug2011 | Charles Johnson | 19 comments | Continued

A Tale of Two Situations

Once upon a time selling a chicken was fraught with few if any legal implications. Remodeling a shed was equally simple from a regulatory standpoint. Today, however, we live in more enlightened times. Protected from our wayward desires by an empowered bureaucracy, we can rest easier knowing that decisions like what we eat and where [...]

24Aug2011 | Paul Schwennesen | 4 comments | Continued

Taylorism, Progressivism, and Rule by Experts

The Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century—the doctrine from which the main current of modern liberalism developed—is sometimes erroneously viewed as an “anti-business” philosophy. It was anti-market to be sure, but by no means necessarily anti-business. Progressivism was, more than anything, managerialist. The American economy after the Civil War became increasingly dominated [...]

24Aug2011 | Kevin A. Carson | 13 comments | Continued

Indigenous African Free-Market Liberalism

Africa remains an enigmatic paradox: a continent rich in mineral resources yet so desperately poor. But the paradox is only superficial: Africa is poor because she is not free. Only 10 of the 54 African countries can be labeled economic success stories: Angola, Benin, Botswana, Ghana, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Uganda, and South Africa. This [...]

24Aug2011 | George B. N. Ayittey | 5 comments | Continued
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