The Goal is Freedom

Contraception: Insuring the Uninsurable

Update below. Controversy rages over the Obama administration’s mandate that all employers – including Catholic hospitals and universities -- include free contraception in their employee health insurance policies. Catholic officials object that since their church forbids contraception, the decree violates the First Amendment’ s protection of religious freedom. Others have joined ...
February 10, 2012

Capitalism, Corporatism, and the Freed Market

When a front-running presidential contender tells the country that thanks to Barack Obama, “[w]e are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy,” one is left scratching one’s head. How refreshing it is, then, to hear a prominent establishment economist – a Nobel laureate yet -- tell ...
February 3, 2012

The Chimera of Tax Fairness

In his State of the Union speech Tuesday night President Obama played the fairness card in calling for higher taxes on upper-income people. He said: [W]e need to change our tax code so that people like me, and an awful lot of Members of Congress, pay our fair share of taxes. ...
January 27, 2012

The Internet Dodges the SOPA Bullet — for Now

Last week the acronyms SOPA and PIPA were unheard of, much less decipherable, by most people. Yet the other day a groundswell of opposition to them, led by Wikipedia, Google, and other Internet entities, was powerful enough to persuade a significant number of members of Congress to abandon their active ...
January 20, 2012

Austrian Economics Hits the Headlines

When a presidential candidate declares, as Ron Paul has, “We’re all Austrians now,” it’s inevitable that his critics would try to discredit him – whether they understand what he’s talking about or not. That’s what Matthew Yglesias does in his Slate piece “What Is ‘Austrian Economics’?” I recommend the piece because ...
January 13, 2012

The Mobility Gap: What Does It Mean?

“Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe.” That’s how the New York Times began a page-one news story yesterday. It is a thoughtful story that offer a variety of explanations -- some of them mitigating -- for the so-called “mobility gap.” This subject merits ...
January 6, 2012

Lawrence O’Donnell and Government Job-Creation

The commercial seems like a parody, but that sure looks like Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC’s “Last Word.” In the spot O’Donnell mocks politicians who say that “government can’t create jobs.” “The government created your job!” O’Donnell fires back, smiling triumphantly. Imagine: In a battle of wits with a phantom politician, O’Donnell lost. ...
December 23, 2011

From 1944 to Nineteen Eighty-Four

Note: Since much talk of Hayek and his classic The Road to Serfdom is in the air, it seems appropriate to reprise this article from 2009. I'm inclined to think of George Orwell and F. A. Hayek at the same time. Both showed great courage in writing the truth, undaunted by ...
December 16, 2011

Fearing Hayek

I’m sensing some panic in the air. Certain people seem mighty concerned that other people are . . . discovering Hayek. As a W. S. Gilbert character might say, Oh horror! Economics and business reporter David Warsh is getting much attention for suggesting that F. A. Hayek, far from being one ...
December 9, 2011

Indefinite Detention and the Free Society

Permit me to state the obvious: The government shouldn't be allowed to imprison people indefinitely without charge or trial. It shouldn't be necessary to say this nearly 800 years after Magna Carta was signed and over 200 years after the Fifth Amendment was ratified. Yet this uncomplicated principle, which is within ...
December 2, 2011

Putting Bureaucracy First: Rachel Maddow’s Progressivism

Progressives today say people should come before profits. Now in a privilege-ridden corporate state, that’s a worthy goal, though Progressives have no clue how to achieve it. How nice it would be if they were equally committed to putting people before bureaucracy. Here they fall down rather badly because their ...
November 18, 2011

Back to Basics

Note: I wrote this for the December 2002 issue of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, before I inaugurated TGIF in 2006. I repost it today especially for readers who never ran across it before. Lately I’ve landed in discussions about whether there is such a thing as human action. I'm not ...
November 11, 2011

They’re Not Insulting Our Mothers

The last thing I wish to do is wade into the morass of income statistics to ascertain if the rich are really getting richer while the rest of us are getting poorer. We’ve all heard the line about “lies, damned lies, and statistics” (though we don’t know who first said ...
November 4, 2011

Social Cooperation, Part 3

In recent months I’ve drawn attention to the emphasis that free-market liberals historically have placed on social cooperation. (Here and here.) Contrary to the partly self-inflicted caricature of the libertarian as an atomistic, rugged, self-reliant individualist, the weightiest thinkers in this tradition have in fact stressed the indispensability of sociality to ...
October 28, 2011

Let Sleeping Failures Lie: The Reconstruction Finance Corporation

(Note: The Great Recession continues to generate calls for at least New Deal-style response, if not much more. As has been noted lately, the New Deal actually began, in substance if not in name, under Franklin Roosevelt’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover. His first program after the stock market crash of 1929 ...
October 21, 2011

Destroying Value

In Cleveland and other American cities homes are being demolished because five years after the housing bust there is nothing better to do with them. Therein lies a lesson in Austrian business cycle theory. In a world of uncertainty, waste -- the destruction of value -- is inevitable. Human action, which ...
October 14, 2011

Steve Jobs, Entrepreneur

When I think of Steve Jobs I naturally think: entrepreneur. What does that mean? I like how Ludwig von Mises and his student Israel Kirzner described this role in the market. Here are some passages from Mises’s Human Action (emphasis added): The term entrepreneur as used by catallactic theory means: acting ...
October 7, 2011

Occupying Wall Street

The Occupy Wall Street protest that began two weeks ago has not yet brought New York’s financial district to a halt -- or gotten much media attention outside New York for that matter. At most, only a few hundred protesters have been on the scene. (Protests in other cities have ...
September 30, 2011

Natural, Not National, Rights

Somewhere in my reading about immigration, someone made the deceptively simple point that it's not immigrationwe should be talking about but migration. That's another way of saying the focus has been on us, when it should be on the people coming to the United States. The discussion has proceeded as if they have ...
September 26, 2011

Elizabeth Warren’s Non Sequitur

[Updated September 24, 2011] If you spend any time on a social network, you’re bound to come across this video of Elizabeth Warren, who’s running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. In her remarks she says: There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a ...
September 23, 2011

Government Is Force

Some pundits really don’t understand why libertarians dislike government and therefore want it to do little, if anything at all. Unable to grasp the reason, the pundits assign bad motives to those who disparage government: They don’t like poor people, or workers, or the sick, or education. But what’s so hard ...
September 16, 2011

Depression, War, and Recovery

In a recent mini-debate on the radio with a Keynesian economist, I ran into the increasingly popular claim that massive spending during World War II ended the Great Depression. (Listen to my response here.) In an odd way this is progress. If it took World War II to end the ...
September 9, 2011

Ponzi Unmasked

Texas governor and Republican presidential aspirant Rick Perry stirred up a fuss when he impolitely called Social Security “a Ponzi scheme.” Was he right? Ponzi schemes, which appear to be investment programs, have two elements. First, no investment actually takes place. People are promised returns on their money, but those returns ...
September 2, 2011

Social Cooperation, Part 2

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Ludwig von Mises’s emphasis on social cooperation as the basis of his economic philosophy, particularly in his magnum opus, Human Action. I thought I’d follow up with more thoughts on this subject. Mises was no maverick in this regard. Interest in social cooperation pervades ...
August 26, 2011

Progressive Intolerance

Television pundits increasingly express an attitude that is at once arrogant and ignorant: The people who oppose Keynesian economics – specifically a massive increase in government deficit spending to create jobs and jumpstart the economy – are the same kind of people who also believe that the earth is only ...
August 19, 2011

Social Cooperation

At FEE’s Advanced Austrian Economics Seminar last week, more than one speaker mentioned that Ludwig von Mises considered a different title for the book we know as Human Action. The other title? Social Cooperation. I’ve heard that story before, but this time it got me thinking: Would the free-market movement have ...
August 12, 2011

The Debt Sky

Since the sky is now apparently the limit, I rechristen the debt ceiling “the debt sky.” But seriously — no, that was serious. The Washington Times reported Wednesday: U.S. debt shot up $239 billion on Tuesday — the largest one-day bump in history — as the government flexed the new borrowing room ...
August 5, 2011

The New Fed

“Things are seldom what they seem.” –W.S. Gilbert, "H.M.S. Pinafore" Nowhere is this more true than in government – which means we have to watch it closely. Unfortunately preconceived notions can make us impervious to events right in front of us and lead us to colossal misperceptions. Take the Federal Reserve System. ...
July 29, 2011

Bondholders and Victims

The raging debt limit controversy raises myriad moral issues that are of interest to libertarians but hardly anyone else. It is assumed almost universally that the U.S. government must make its interest payment and cover its other financial obligations on August 3, the day after the drop-dead date for a debt ...
July 22, 2011

Taxation Is Still Robbery

Whether President Obama and congressional Republicans can work out a deal to let the government to borrow even more (!) money seems to hang on whether the latter will go for increased in tax revenues. Following the zigzagging negotiations isn’t easy. First the aim was a short-term deal. Then both sides ...
July 15, 2011

About that Debt Limit

What’s the point of a debt ceiling if raising it is a mere formality? As the U.S. government neared its $14.29 trillion debt limit, the congressional vote to raise it was expected to be uncontroversial. That’s pretty much how it’s been in the past. In the first decade of this century, ...
July 8, 2011

Default in the Future

The on-and-off discussions in Washington over how – not whether – to raise the debt ceiling and reduce future budget deficits have long passed the point of farce. Watching the politicians’ antics, one wonders why anybody ever thought they (or their predecessors) could be trusted with power. One thing they all ...
July 1, 2011

Of Malice and Straw Men

We libertarians must be onto something. Why else would critics work so hard to construct straw men to demolish rather than contending with our actual arguments? Right from the top you could tell that Stephen Metcalf’s recent blast in Slate would be no different. (This is nothing new for Slate.) “Liberty Scam” ...
June 24, 2011

Obama’s Economics Lesson

President Obama apparently thinks that until the latest recession, no business realized it might reduce its workforce by substituting machines and other high-tech devices. When asked by NBC’s Ann Curry why he hasn’t been able to convince business owners to hire more people (as if the question makes any sense), ...
June 17, 2011

Affording It All

People who don’t understand -- or who don’t care about -- economics say funny things. Well, they would be funny if they weren’t so damaging when translated into government policy. Take Lawrence O’Donnell, host of MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. He must be a smart guy. He’s articulate (when ...
June 10, 2011

Slave Labor and Intellectual Property

The libertarian challenge to the legitimacy of “intellectual property” has created some confusion. It’s understandable. For one thing, there’s an apparent inconsistency: If one favors property rights in tangible things, why not in intangibles? Pro-property IP opponents reply that the tangible/intangible distinction is decisive. When you take someone’s car without ...
June 3, 2011

Lawless Government

Everyone pays lip service to the rule of law. Indeed I’ve never heard of anyone rejecting it as undesirable. (It has been called impossible under prevailing circumstances but that is a different point.) So why is the principle so flagrantly violated with almost no public outrage? Take President Obama’s intervention in ...
May 27, 2011

End the IMF

[Updated May 23, 2011] It’s a topsy-turvy world. “Anarchists” protest cuts in government spending, while “socialists” live in the lap of luxury, including $3,000-a-night Manhattan hotel suites, working, in at least one celebrated case, to impose corporatist-flavored “neoliberalism” on the troubled countries of the world. The sex scandal involving the just-departed International ...
May 20, 2011

About Those Oil Company Tax Breaks

Whether or not one has a warm cozy feeling about big oil companies, one should be troubled by the government’s power to issue selective “tax breaks” and to rescind them whenever politicians need the money. You won’t catch me saying anything nice about any tax, but I reserve a ...
May 13, 2011

No Laissez Faire There

(This article is based on remarks delivered at the meeting of the Association of Private Enterprise Education in April.) Friends of the free market tend to see the Gilded Age, roughly 1870-1890, as the closest thing in history to a laissez-faire economy. In some respects that is true -- but it’s ...
May 6, 2011

Medical Consumer or Ward of the State?

How did it become normal, or for that matter even acceptable, to refer to medical patients as “consumers”? The relationship between patient and doctor used to be considered something special, almost sacred. Now politicians and supposed reformers talk about the act of receiving care as if it were no different ...
April 29, 2011

Budget-Cutting Resistance

So here’s the problem: While polls show that people want the government’s budget deficit and the national debt reduced, they don’t want the biggest spending items cut. Some numbers: In the latest ABC-Washington Post poll (April 17), 59 percent said that the deficit should reduced through a combination of unspecified spending ...
April 22, 2011

Saving the Warfare-Welfare State

Why does everyone think Washington is plagued by excessive partisanship? The contest over how to address the fiscal debacle says otherwise: Both divisions of the uniparty (Democrat and Republican) agree that the warfare-welfare state must be saved. It's the means not the end that divides them. Rep. Paul Ryan, who leads ...
April 15, 2011

Had Enough Yet?

The last couple of TGIF columns focused on the trees -- some victims of government action -- rather than the forest – Leviathan itself. Today’s topic – the looming fiscal disaster – is a case in which concentrating on the trees can lead one to miss the forest altogether. After the ...
April 8, 2011

A Victim of the State, pt. 2

Is it a criminal offense to irritate a U.S. attorney? Apparently so. If the case of Siobhan Reynolds is any indication, it’s a serious offense that can cost a person a lot of money as well as her freedom to speak in public -- without ever being charged with a ...
April 1, 2011

A Victim of the State

Sometimes we don’t see the trees for the forest. Advocates of liberty focus on the big picture: war, inflation, taxation, government spending and borrowing, drug prohibition, economic restrictions, privilege, the erosion of civil liberties, limits on immigration, and more. Sometimes the flesh-and-blood victims of government get lost in the theoretical discussion. But ...
March 25, 2011

No One Can Run the Country

I don’t mean to pick on David Brooks, the resident conservative op-ed scribe at the New York Times, and I have no reason to defend President Obama on any count, but I can’t keep silent when I read Brooks assailing Obama for being too “prudent.” Prudence can sometimes look like weakness…. ...
March 18, 2011

A Revolutionary for All Seasons

If it hasn’t been done already, I hope someone is translating Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (particularly part 2) into Arabic. People rising up against dictators throughout the Middle East and North Africa should be reading that book; it will come in handy when they’ve driven the dictators from power ...
March 11, 2011

Free the Children, Cut the Budget

Pundits like David Brooks of the New York Times lament that the deficit-cutting mood supposedly sweeping the United States is myopically targeting education in favor of more powerful constituencies. “If you look across the country, you see education financing getting sliced -- often in the most thoughtless and destructive ways,” ...
March 4, 2011

Wisconsin Labor Brouhaha

That’s quite a row going on in Wisconsin. The new governor, elected without the support of most government-employee unions, has proposed to cut back the scope of collective bargaining for most state workers. Scott Walker says the budget measure is needed to save money as well as government jobs for ...
February 25, 2011

There’s Got to Be a Better Way

What’s so remarkable about events in the Middle East is that a significant number of people who had felt powerless looked around at what they’d seen every day of their lives and thought for the first time: “It doesn’t have to be like this.” When will Americans do that? I know the ...
February 18, 2011

What Egyptians Are Teaching the World

In Egypt the powers that be continue to defy the peaceful throngs in the streets. Yet their rulers’ clumsy efforts to mollify the courageous people remind us of something usually overlooked about the nature of political power, namely, that ideas, not force, ultimately rule, for as Jeffrey Rogers Hummel says, ...
February 11, 2011

Wrong Lesson from Egypt

One wrong conclusion being drawn from the popular uprising against the dictatorship in Egypt is that the American government could ignore such things if we were “energy independent.” (It's unclear if this means independent of Middle Eastern oil or completely independent.) A moment’s reflection should be enough to jettison that ...
February 4, 2011

Obama’s Corporatist Big Plans

Win the future. What did Barack Obama mean when he uttered those ridiculous words in some form more than ten times during his State of the Union speech? Was it just an exhortation or does it have actual content? If “we” – who exactly? – are to win the future, ...
January 28, 2011

Wrong Questions

“Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Fifty years ago yesterday, John F. Kennedy said those words during his inauguration as president. It is undoubtedly the best-known line from any American inaugural address, except perhaps for FDR’s “[T]he only thing we ...
January 21, 2011

Value, Cost, Marginal Utility, and Böhm-Bawerk

Does cost of production determine price or does price determine cost of production? In the world of economic caricatures, the classical economists (Smith, Ricardo, et al.) took the former position, the Austrians the latter. Specifically, the Austrian view supposedly is that that demand driven by marginal utility determines the price ...
January 14, 2011

The Importance of Subjectivism in Economics

After many years, Frédéric Bastiat remains a hero to libertarians. No mystery there. He made the case for freedom and punctured the arguments for state socialism with clarity and imagination. He spoke to lay readers with great effect. Bastiat loved the market economy, and badly wanted it to blossom in full ...
January 7, 2011

A Boost for the Managed Economy

Nowhere is it easier to miss the forest for the trees than in discussions of government policy. For the past week the media have been saturated with debates over the "compromise" tax package agreed to by Barack Obama and congressional Republicans. The package passed by the House and Senate includes ...
December 17, 2010

“F” as in Fed

The Federal Reserve, America's fatally conceited monetary central planner, is not terribly popular these days – which is cause for hope – and now we have a report card on the entire Fed era that strongly supports the view that we’d be better off without it. At the very least, ...
December 10, 2010

A Free Market in Banking? Not Even Close

How close are we to having a free market in the United States -- and does it matter? This issue came up briefly in a recent installment of the excellent podcast series “EconTalk,” when George Mason University professor Russ Roberts interviewed Australian economist John Quiggin, author of Zombie Economics: How Dead ...
December 3, 2010

The Many Impositions of the State

[See update below.] Not that I’m keeping score, but just in the last few weeks the news has overflowed with examples of how much we are at the mercy of government edict. The three stories I'm thinking of, quite unrelated on the surface, are: the spreading but so far futile protests ...
November 19, 2010

Help for the Downtrodden Corporate Exporter

The current occupant of the White House made quite a splash on his trip to India when he announced that 50,000 American jobs would be created thanks to $15 billion in U.S. export contracts. We'll ignore Barack Obama’s grab at credit for these deals. Rupa Subramanya Dehejia of India Real ...
November 12, 2010

Budget Mice

So, we’ve made it through another election. Obama euphoria is gone, and control of the House of Representatives has gone to the opposition wing of the uniparty. The deficit-spenders and high taxers have been partly displaced by the cutters. Or that’s what we’re supposed to believe. What can we expect? To listen ...
November 5, 2010

Is Freedom a Radical Idea?

[The following is drawn from my remarks delivered at Libertopia, October 15.] The answer to the question “Is freedom a radical idea” is:  no and yes. Let me explain. Starting with the “no”:  Most children grow up learning the libertarian, or nonaggression, ethic. Parents say: “Don’t hit, don’t take other kids’ stuff ...
October 29, 2010

Obamacare Reality Bites

One might think that letting government officials exercise discretion in the enforcement of bad regulations would be a good thing. I’m not so sure. The Obama-inspired overhaul of medical insurance has just started to kick in, and already reality, in the form of economic law, is biting back. Companies are canceling ...
October 22, 2010

The Charade

Dinesh D’Souza has the bizarre idea that Barack Obama’s presidency can be best understood by realizing that “Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s [that is, Obama’s late estranged Kenyan father]. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the ...
October 15, 2010

Presidential Hubris

If we were going to spend $700 billion, it seems it would be wiser having that $700 billion going to folks who would spend that money right away. Barack Obama said those words in defense of his opposition to extending the soon-to-expire 2001 and 2003 tax-rate reductions for people making more ...
October 8, 2010

What Education Needs

As an antidote to the blather masquerading on MSNBC this week as serious discussion of education, I prescribe the wisdom of Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), the English classical-liberal political philosopher, scientist, and religious Dissenter. In An Essay on the First Principles of Government, and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and ...
October 1, 2010

The Anti-anti-authoritarians

See Update below. I’m not a member of the Tea Party. For one thing, no coherent philosophy has emerged from its activities, which explains its grab-bag of positions, some good, some not so good. As a result, it’s not entirely clear what this collection of individuals fundamentally is for and against. ...
September 24, 2010

The Grasping Macroeconomic Managers

A tax cut for the top 2 percent is “just not a good use of limited resources.” That’s what Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said on television the other day. Sorry, but I can’t get my mind off taxes. So even though I wrote about them two weeks ago, I must do ...
September 17, 2010

Not All Choices Are Equal

Opponents of the freedom philosophy never run out of insipid rebuttals. The latest to have a go at it is Martin Wolf of the Financial Times. Wolf ponders the question “What is the role of the state,” and notes that a “strand” of classical liberalism (or libertarianism) “believes the answer is ...
September 10, 2010

Paying for Tax Cuts?

“How will we pay for the tax cut?” I laugh when I hear that question because it’s so obviously illogical. If the government were to cut taxes, say, by lowering rates or outright repeal, people would simply be free to hold on to money they otherwise would have sent to the ...
September 3, 2010

Trading for Security

Americans tolerate a costly global national-security apparatus in part because they believe the country would be economically vulnerable without it. After all, we use resources from all over the world – oil being only the most prominent example. What if an embargo cut us off from supplies? Anyone expressing skepticism about ...
August 27, 2010

The Most Dangerous Derivative

In the October 1962 issue of The Freeman an obscure 28-year-old lawyer wrote, in perhaps his first published work (see update below): Giant government has outgrown the capacity of the institutions designed to restrain its encroachments and abuses…. [F]reedom, to be meaningful, must find direct expression in practice as well as ...
August 20, 2010

Who’s Afraid of Socialism?

I predict Thomas Geoghegan’s new book, Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?, will ignite a vigorous debate over which is better: American capitalism or German socialism. (If I’m wrong, who’ll remember?) I further predict the debate will be largely worthless. Let me disclose at the outset that I have not read ...
August 13, 2010

Austrian Exploitation Theory

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk (1851-1914), the second-generation giant of Austrian economics, famously refuted the theory, most commonly associated with Marx, that the employer-employee relationship is intrinsically exploitative. Less well known is that Böhm-Bawerk had an exploitation theory of his own, which he expressed in his 1889 masterpiece, Positive Theory of Interest, ...
August 6, 2010

National Insecurity

There’s a country that earlier generations might not recognize in which the national government’s criminal investigative agency can execute its own warrants without court approval; present them to private companies and demand information about people who are not necessarily suspected of criminal wrongdoing; and — if that were not enough ...
July 30, 2010

Regulatory Magic

President Obama has signed the financial industry regulatory overhaul – officially, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Predictably, what he said about it cannot possibly be true. For example: “[T]hese reforms represent the strongest consumer financial protections in history.  And these protections will be enforced by a new ...
July 23, 2010

Deficit Hawks or War Hawks?

Last week’s TGIF asked if the American people can afford a world-girdling foreign policy more befitting an empire than a republic. Look at it this way: War hawks make poor deficit hawks. Facing a $13 trillion national debt and trillion-dollar-plus annual budget deficits, we can’t afford to be ...
July 16, 2010

Can America Afford an Empire?

Fiscally speaking, the U.S. government has been running a disorderly house for some time. That makes the fiscal crisis in Greece an uneasy portent for Americans (as Steven Horwitz points out here). Just contemplate some of the numbers. The total federal debt is nearly $13 trillion, $8.6 trillion of which is ...
July 9, 2010

Border Control Bogey

As if we weren’t already aware, the current occupant of the White House yesterday proved himself every bit the social engineer his predecessors were. Health insurance, energy, the financial industry, education, nation building – in each area and more the head of the executive branch, Barack Obama, has embraced the ...
July 2, 2010

The Function of The Freeman

Editor’s Note: The Freeman began publication before it became part of the Foundation for Economic Education. Its first issue was published in 1950, with Henry Hazlitt as one of its editors and FEE founder Leonard E. Read a member of the board of directors. Today’s guest column was originally part ...
June 25, 2010

Class Struggle Rightly Conceived

Karl Marx is famous for drawing attention to the idea of class struggle. Yet remarkably in 1852, historian David Hart recounts, Marx wrote, "[A]s far as I am concerned, the credit for having discovered the existence and the conflict of classes in modern society does not belong to me. Bourgeois ...
June 23, 2010

It’s All State Capitalism

David Brooks, the New York Times resident conservative op-ed writer, is power's best friend. He always tries to make it look so benign. In a column this week he begins by warning that we should not be fooled by the current friction between the government and BP: “[T]his conflict is ...
June 18, 2010

You Really Want Government Drilling for Oil?

You’ve got to hand it to the people who really dislike free markets. They see them everywhere (under every bed?) and especially wherever any serious problem arises. That no free market exists within a thousand miles makes no difference whatsoever. Take the oil spill in the Gulf.  Market opponents are having ...
June 11, 2010

Fixing Global Warming for Fun If Not Profit

Amateur global-warming skeptics can make me uncomfortable. Don’t get me wrong: I am skeptical that either human activities or natural phenomena are creating the conditions for catastrophic global warming. The case for an approaching calamity indeed seems riddled with problems. Those recently exposed emails certainly sounded damaging. But as I’ve pointed ...
June 4, 2010

Libertarianism = Anti-racism

Rand Paul’s comments regarding the federal ban on racial discrimination in public accommodations (Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title II) have brought the libertarian position on civil rights to public attention. (This is odd because Paul insists, "I'm not a libertarian.") It’s not been an entirely comfortable experience for libertarians. For ...
May 28, 2010

Antifederalists Vindicated

If the Antifederalists were still on the scene today, they might be saying -- as they would have been saying right along -- “Told you so.” The latest occasion is this week’s 7-2 Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Comstock et al., upholding a federal statute that permits the civil commitment ...
May 21, 2010

Self-Regulation in the Corporate State: The BP Spill

With modifications on May 18, 2010 With some 7,000 barrels of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico each day from BP’s exploded Deepwater Horizon well, offshore drilling and oil-industry regulation have returned to the front pages. The familiar old trap is set: Do you want unfettered markets and oil spills or ...
May 14, 2010

Subjugating Ourselves

In The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, the sixteenth-century French poet, judge, and political philosopher Étienne de La Boétie wondered how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power ...
May 7, 2010

Financial Regulation and the “Money Power”

In one of his essays criticizing inflationary free-silver proposals in the late nineteenth century, the great laissez-faire champion William Graham Sumner wrote: We hear fierce denunciations of what is called the “money power.” It is spoken of as mighty, demoniacal, dangerous, and schemes are proposed for mastering it which are futile ...
April 30, 2010

The Washington-Wall Street Kabuki Dance

When I watch the public furor over the ruling party’s attempt to “toughen” regulations on the financial industry, I get the same feeling I often have in a theater: Good show but it’s not real. There’s something eerily ritualistic about the current occupant of the White House berating Wall Street for ...
April 23, 2010

Is Capitalism Something Good?

Earlier this week I attended the annual meeting of the Association of Private Enterprise Education in Las Vegas to participate in a panel with the intriguing title “Free-Market Anti-Capitalism?” Organized by Roderick Long of Auburn University, the panel also included TheFreemanOnline columnist Steven Horwitz of St. Lawrence University, Gary Chartier ...
April 16, 2010

Obey the (Natural) Law

Tax Day approaches, and I’ve been thinking of all the ways government bullies us, demanding we do – and not do – things -- or else. You can get into big trouble for not sending in a bunch of forms to the IRS by April 15 disclosing how much money you ...
April 9, 2010

“What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear”

I took the title from volume 2, section 4, chapter 6 of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. That chapter has been quoted many times in many places. But considering what has been happening legislatively of late (and not just in the last year-plus), it seems like a good time ...
April 2, 2010

Wishful Thinking on Health Care

This is an elaboration of my remarks at the seventh annual Jolicoeur Seminar, an event put on this week by FEE and the economics department at Western New England College, Springfield, Mass. How an issue is framed is crucial to how it is decided. Advocates of the package of health insurance ...
March 26, 2010

The Evil of Government Debt

As we’ve seen in the last two TGIFs, Destutt de Tracy, writing (pdf) in early nineteenth-century France, had solid insights about the market process and government spending as a form of consumption not investment.  (See “Jefferson’s Economist” and “Government as Consumer.”) In light of that, no one will be surprised that ...
March 19, 2010

Government as Consumer

Destutt de Tracy, as I discussed last week, was a French economist whom Thomas Jefferson did his utmost to bring to the attention of America. The first part of Tracy’s A Treatise on Political Economy (1817; pdf), the translation of which Jefferson arranged, is a primer in economics that will ...
March 12, 2010

Jefferson’s Economist

Update below. In 1817 the Frenchman the Count Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) published his Treatise on the Will and Its Effects. Thomas Jefferson, who several decades earlier had been the U.S. representative in France, was so enthusiastic about Tracy’s book that he had it translated, then edited and revised the translation himself. He ...
March 5, 2010

Countdown to Health Insurance Nationalization

The "debate" over what to do about the serious problems in the medical system has been pretty lame, with strange economics, chicanery, and demagoguery run rampant. The minority party’s pitiful offerings and compromises are documented in an article I wrote here. The majority’s several variations on a nationalization theme have ...
February 26, 2010

We Don’t Need No State Education

Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone! --Rogers Waters, Pink Floyd Someone recently said that a particular elementary charter school is a big improvement over government schools because the kids have longer days there and are already thinking about college. I wonder if that’s really an improvement. Kids spend too much time ...
February 19, 2010

Corruption in Government? Shocking!

It’s funny how the people who push hardest for government intervention in more and more areas are the first to gripe that everything has become politicized. What were they expecting? Did they forget that government is a political institution? Paul Krugman and Chris Matthews, among other Progressives, are apoplectic because two ...
February 12, 2010

Obama and the Public

Barack Obama, the current White House occupant, says that the people have a growing sense that “something is broken” in Washington. He attributes this to hyper-partisanship and a consequent lack of civility. As he put it Wednesday, “Those of us in Washington are not serving the people as well as ...
February 5, 2010

The State of Obama’s Union

“[T]he nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy. And America must be that nation.” That line from Wednesday night’s state of the union address was one of several in which the current White House occupant, Barack Obama, displayed a rather ominous nationalist—even ...
January 29, 2010

The Snare of Incremental Heath Care “Reform”

Opponents of (more) government control of health care and health insurance are breathing a sigh of relief after Tuesday’s upset senatorial election in Massachusetts. But now that the celebrations are subsiding, I feel compelled to warn that the most perilous days may lie ahead. How can that be, when Sen. Edward ...
January 22, 2010

Murray Rothbard

In 1946 the fledgling Foundation for Economic Education published a pamphlet titled “Roofs or Ceilings: The Current Housing Problem.” It was a brief against rent control written by two young unknown economists: Milton Friedman and George Stigler. Of course they would go on to win the Nobel Prize in economics ...
January 15, 2010

Opaque By Design

“The House and Senate plan to put together the final health care reform bill behind closed doors according to an agreement by top Democrats.” That less-than-startling piece of news was delivered by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She was at the White House when she said it, so it’s okay with President ...
January 8, 2010

What Next?

U.S. takes majority stake in GMAC, giving lender $3.8 billion more in aid U.S. International Trade Commission rules in favor of U.S. steel industry on subsidized Chinese imports --Washington Post, Dec. 31, 2009 I guess those were appropriate headlines for the final day of 2009. That’s the kind of year it’s been. Government grew larger, ...
January 1, 2010

Workers of the World Unite for a Free Market

By way of Roderick Long I’ve learned that Amazon.com has some pretty rough rules for its employees. (Long draws on the Huffington Post and the Times Online.) According to the Times, employees at the Bedfordshire (UK) warehouse were: Warned that the company refuses to allow sick leave, even if the worker ...
December 18, 2009

Perverse Health Care Incentives

Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic is the only mainstream reporter I am aware of who glimpses what the debate over health care economics should be about. Last month he wrote, “To save costs, Democrats mostly want to change the incentives for providers. Republicans mostly want to change the incentives for patients ...
December 11, 2009

Snow Job Summit

What are the odds that yesterday’s White House jobs summit will lead to the creation of any real jobs? The summit was based on the magic theory of government: Say the right incantations and reality will be reshaped according to one’s desires. There are no economic laws. There is only ...
December 4, 2009

The Power to Tax Is the Power

As if in response to last week’s TGIF, Ruth Marcus, Washington Post op-ed writer, tried to make a constitutional case for the individual health insurance mandate that Congress will surely pass before the year is over. She offered two grounds, the Commerce Clause, which is specified in Senate Majority Leader ...
November 27, 2009

The Mandated Health Insurance Outrage

With the introduction of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s 2,074-page health insurance nationalization bill, we can be thankful for one thing at least. It will most likely be the last bill of its kind introduced this year. Who’d have time to wade through another? This doesn’t mean there is anything in ...
November 20, 2009

Health Insurance Scam

It is fitting, on several levels, that the debate over de facto nationalization of "health care" may hinge on abortion. To get her bill through the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi had to accept an amendment that would forbid the use of taxpayer money to buy insurance policies ...
November 13, 2009

Let’s Ignore Congress

I spent a good part of Wednesday night closely skimming -- my conscience won't let me type “reading” -- the Republicans’ alternative healthcare “reform” bill. It’s 219 pages of legalese. I know it's one-tenth the size of Speaker Pelosi's bill, but that doesn't make for easier navigation. Figuring out how ...
November 6, 2009

The Welfare State Corrupts Absolutely

Let's begin at the beginning. Medical care is not a free good found in nature. Of course, no one really thinks it is. But that doesn't keep most people from wanting to pretend otherwise, and the current institutional setting makes that possible. After a while, one forgets one ...
October 30, 2009

Getting in Deeper

In what the Wall Street Journal calls "a watershed moment for government intervention in the private sector," the Federal Reserve announced yesterday it will regulate executive compensation at all banks so they will not have incentives to take on too much risk. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke said ...
October 23, 2009

Frustrating Michael Moore

If Michael Moore would study a little political economy he might turn into a potent champion of individual liberty. As we see in Moore's new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore is offended by some truly offensive things: banks engaging in wild speculation without concern for the risk, taxpayer bailouts ...
October 16, 2009

Liberty versus Social Engineering

So David Brooks, the New York Times' resident conservative intellectual, must think he's a pretty clever fellow. In trying to characterize "the choices we face on issue after issue," he presumes to enlist the aid of philosophers Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and David Hume (1711-1776). Considering that Bentham ...
October 9, 2009

Being for the Free Market Isn’t Enough

Harold Meyerson, an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post, this week launched a devastating attack on what he calls "mainstream economists." Observe: Has any group of professionals ever been so spectacularly wrong? Pre-Copernican astronomers and cosmologists, I suppose, and for the same reason, really: They had an ...
October 2, 2009

Bastiat in Poland

Last week I mentioned that I traveled to Warsaw, Poland, to participate in the Liberty Weekend Devoted to the Life and Legacy of Frédéric Bastiat. I can report now that the conference, sponsored by PAFERE, the Polish-American Foundation for Economic Research and Education, was a smashing ...
September 25, 2009

Monsieur Bastiat, Call Your Office

Tomorrow I'll lecture at the Liberty Weekend Dedicated to 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 (online in PDF format here and for sale here). Oh ...
September 18, 2009

ObamaCare: Status Quo on Steroids

Let's begin by noting that the so-called health-insurance companies deserve little sympathy. As they exist today, they are very much creatures of the State. In fact, there's a sense in which it can be said that if we didn't have health-insurance companies, we wouldn't need them. Economist ...
September 11, 2009

From 1944 to Nineteen Eighty-Four

I'm inclined to think of George Orwell and F. A. Hayek at the same time. Both showed great courage in writing the truth, undaunted by the consequences awaiting them. Both valued freedom, though they understood it differently. Orwell, a man of the "left," could not remain silent in the face ...
September 4, 2009

Proposers versus Producers

Why do people who really make us better off get nowhere near the attention when they die that prominent national politicians get? "Prominent national politicians" isn't quite what I mean. "Prominent politicians who favored government power over liberty" is more on target. The media spotlight on the late Sen. Edward Kennedy ...
August 28, 2009

Obama’s Health-Insurance Cartel

President Obama and other advocates of nationalized health insurance have tried a variety of sales pitches, which indicates their difficulty in getting traction with the public. The latest is "competition and choice." Who could be against those things? Well, Obama for one, followed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House member ...
August 21, 2009

The Overlooked Solution for Health Care

Discussing healthcare reform with an advocate of government control is frustrating. It almost feels as if one is speaking a foreign language -- and in a sense, the free-market proponent is speaking a foreign language. The meaning usually doesn't get through. This is most obvious when the ...
August 14, 2009

The Market Doesn’t Ration Health Care

Healthcare reformers say they have two objectives: to enable the uninsured and under-insured to consume more medical services than they consume now, and to keep the prices of those services from rising, as they have been, faster than the prices of other goods and services. Unfortunately, Economics 101 tells us ...
August 7, 2009

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” are to be made ...
July 31, 2009

A Cornucopia of Healthcare Fallacies

The effort to reinvent medical care is so full of fallacies and bad logic that it would take volumes to properly expose them. Nevertheless, in this short space, let's take a crack  at some of the problems. To begin, the "reformers" want to compel insurers to cover people who are already ...
July 24, 2009

Sotomayor, Freedom, and the Law

The dreary Senate hearing on the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court left me so in the doldrums that my only chance for solace was to dig out my copy of Freedom and the Law (1961) by Bruno Leoni. Leoni (1913-1967) was a professor ...
July 17, 2009

Son of “Stimulus”

Bad economic policy proposals usually have a superficial logic that fools the economically illiterate into thinking the policies really make sense. For example, anti-price-gouging laws seem to keep goods affordable during emergencies. The government says no one may raise prices "excessively" on generators, batteries, and bottled water. Hurray for wise ...
July 10, 2009

Congress Declares Independence

What a difference a year can make. On July 6, 1775, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, issued the Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms. It had been drafted by a radical in Congress, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, but revised -- "toned down," it is ...
July 2, 2009

The Misrepresentation of Health Care Reform

In the debate over medical reform, everyone can find a public-opinion poll to support his or her position. Robert Reich, who favors deeper government involvement in health care than we already have, wrote recently, "In the most recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 76% of respondents ...
June 26, 2009

Obama’s Impossible Healthcare Reform Promises

In his drive to "reform" health care -- that is, redesign 18 percent of the U.S. economy -- Barack Obama is clearly terrified that his mission will crash and burn if people think it will cost them their freedom of choice in doctors and insurance. He is surely convinced that ...
June 19, 2009

Intellectual “Property” Versus Real Property

Intellectual “property” (IP) is a sleeper issue. It seems uncontroversial: Someone invents or writes something and therefore owns it. What could be plainer? But IP contains the power to destroy liberty. IP isn’t merely about rock bands preventing kids from sharing MP3s over the Internet. (See "Weird Al" Yankovic's musical commentary, ...
June 12, 2009

Regulation Red Herring

Most people believe that government must regulate the marketplace. The only alternative to a regulated market, the thinking goes, is an unregulated market. On first glance that makes sense. It’s the law of excluded middle. A market is either regulated or it's not. Cashing in on the common notion that anything ...
June 5, 2009

The Rule of Lore

"This is a nation of laws not of men (and women)." With the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, we will be hearing that a lot in the coming weeks. The nomination of a Supreme Court justice occasions much public debate over exactly what judges are supposed to ...
May 29, 2009

Medical Misunderstanding

Economic illiteracy will be hazardous to your health. Barack Obama says, “[T]he most significant driver — by far — of our long-term debt and our long-term deficits is ever-escalating health care costs. If we don’t reform how health care is delivered in this country, then we are not going to be able ...
May 22, 2009

Government Run Amok

The “federal” government, particularly the executive branch, can do almost anything it wants. The limits are few, and those that survive can often be gotten around through chicanery. Much of what government does is out of public view, thanks to off-budget accounting and other dubious methods that would get the ...
May 15, 2009

The Bankers’ Bank

The Federal Reserve System does more than conjure up money from thin air. (That would be enough!) The Fed is also regulator/protector of the American banking industry. Indeed, as recent events amply demonstrate, we may think of the industry as a government-organized protectionist cartel, with the Fed as the hub. ...
May 8, 2009

Of, By, and For the Elite

The New York Times pulled back the curtain this week to give readers a rare glimpse at the workings of a political-economy essentially run by a ruling elite. Anyone who thinks representative democracy can’t coexist with rule by a political class is in for a surprise. The clique need not ...
May 1, 2009

Boomerang: Government and Systemic Risk

If you’re not careful when throwing a boomerang, it could come around and hit you in the back of the neck. Politicians and bureaucrats should learn the same lesson when touting their supposedly indispensable role in safeguarding the country’s economic security. If you look closely, you find that they are ...
April 24, 2009

Government Bias

Anyone discussing social and economic problems with a hardcore free-market advocate hears a string of indictments against the government. Housing bubble and financial disarray? Government housing and monetary policies caused it. Drug-cartel violence? Prohibition is the culprit. Soaring healthcare costs? Government intervention stimulates demand and limits supply. Exorbitant higher-education costs? Government ...
April 17, 2009

Bad Regulation Drives Out Good

In 1969 economist Harold Demsetz identified an important flaw in much public policy analysis, the “Nirvana Fallacy.” We would do well to keep it in mind as we think about solutions to the current economic problems. Demsetz described the fallacy thus: “The view that now pervades much public policy economics implicitly ...
April 9, 2009

The G(rasping)-20

We expected little of sense to come out of the G-20 summit, and it met our expectations with flying colors. When you don’t understand how the economy got into a mess, you are not likely to understand how it can get out. Politicians either can’t or won’t graps the key fact: ...
April 3, 2009

What the Drug Warriors Have Given Us

Violence among Mexico’s drug cartels and government has spilled over the U.S. border and beyond.  The New York Times reports, In the past few years, the cartels and other drug trafficking organizations have extended their reach across the United States and into Canada. Law enforcement authorities say they believe traffickers distributing ...
March 27, 2009

Crocodile Tears over AIG

If politicians spill any more crocodile tears over AIG , the EPA might have to declare Washington, D.C. a protected wetland. Sweep aside the phony expressions of “outrage” over AIG’s government-financed $165 million in bonuses (the information was in black and white) and ask yourself this: Who supplied the money? When politicians hand ...
March 20, 2009

Crisis and Opportunity

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” –Rahm Emanuel Has President Obama’s chief of staff read Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan? Probably not, and he wouldn’t have had to. Higgs’s ...
March 13, 2009

Free to Consume, Or Not

As someone who is rather less eager to consume than previously, I feel harassed by the government, mainstream economists, and news media. You may feel the same way. Apparently, we aren’t consuming enough to suit them. At least that’s what they want us to think. More than that, they want ...
March 6, 2009

All About Greed

It comes down to greed. That’s what the economic turmoil is all about for many people. Too many of us were greedy, and now everyone is paying the price. Luckily this belief is wrong, because if it were right we’d be up the creek. Greed, however defined, presumably has always been and ...
February 27, 2009

Less than Nothing

The story is told that Ludwig von Mises was once asked, "Do you mean to say that the government should have done nothing during the Great Depression?" Mises responded, "I mean to say it should have started doing nothing long before that." I hope the story is not apocryphal, because it ...
February 20, 2009

Keynes Returns

Keynes is all the rage these days. Our House of Commons and Lords--sorry, House of Representatives and Senate--are brimming with Keynesians, and more than one news commentator has boldly declared (as we've heard before), "We're all Keynesians now." (An exception is Newsweek, whose cover blares, "We Are All Socialists Now," but ...
February 13, 2009

Smoot and Hawley Return

Sheldon Richman is the editor of The Freeman and "In brief," and author of  "Fascism" in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. TGIF appears Fridays. As if the “economic stimulus” bill was not bad enough, it also contains a “Buy American” provision. It is now truly an economic sabotage bill. This is ...
February 6, 2009

Washington Logic

Let me see if I have this straight. The U.S. government is going to borrow $819-$??? billion, largely from the Chinese (if they'll lend it, which they may not) and put that money into people's pockets in a hundred different ways, from paying workers for filling potholes, to extending unemployment ...
January 30, 2009

Boon or Doggle?

Even if government spending in theory could "stimulate the economy" in a genuine, sustainable way, it would not follow that politicians and bureaucrats would know how to spend the money intelligently. The pressures to do something now and the perverse incentives facing those in charge of the money guarantee there ...
January 23, 2009

“I, Pencil” Revisited

Leonard Read's classic essay, "I, Pencil," which is now 50 years old, is justly celebrated as the best short introduction to the division of labor and undesigned order ever written. Read saw an "extraordinary miracle ... [in the] the configuration of creative human energies—millions of tiny know-hows configurating naturally and ...
January 16, 2009

Inflation as Income Distribution

The Federal Reserve has been pumping hundreds of billions of newly created dollars into "the economy." Much of that money has been sent to Wall Street to bailout large, struggling firms. But that's just the beginning. President-elect Obama says that since he needs to "stimulate the economy" ...
January 9, 2009

News Flash: FDR Didn’t Fix The Economy!

The New Deal did not end the Great Depression. This statement will come as no shock to FEE supporters, but it will to the many people who never encountered it before. Now people are encountering it -- in newspaper columns and news-talk shows. Why, after years of being taught that ...
December 15, 2008

Auto-Destruct

The Big Three automakers got a cold reception in Congress this week when they asked for a bailout loan of $25 billion. But I wouldn't count them out just yet. After appropriating over $700 billion to bail out the financial industry -- with nothing to show for ...
November 23, 2008

Save Us from Government Spending

If you're a glutton for torment as I am, you watch cable-TV news shows most nights. These days the shows are feeding viewers a steady diet of 100-proof Keynesianism as the cure for our economic woes. Leading in this department is Chris Matthews of MSNBC's "Hardball." (I ...
November 14, 2008

Humility or Hubris

Sheldon Richman is the editor of The Freeman and "In brief," and author of "Fascism" in The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. TGIF appears Fridays. Comments welcome. Another presidential election has come and gone, only this time the results are astoundingly and, yes, satisfyingly historic. In light of our racial history and ...
November 7, 2008

The S-Word

So the S-word has surfaced in the presidential campaign. One candidate accuses the other candidate of being a socialist because he would raise taxes on the wealthy while cutting taxes for, among others, workers who pay no income taxes. The accused laughs it off, saying next he'll ...
October 31, 2008

Who Needs Evidence?

Around the corner from FEE's offices, on Main Street in Irvington, N.Y., there's a life-size statue of Rip Van Winkle awakening from his 20-year slumber. After reading Jacob Weisberg's Newsweek and Slate columns this week, I feel as though I must have been asleep ...
October 25, 2008

Capitalism and Freedom

These measures are not intended to take over the free market, but to preserve it, George W. Bush said in Orwellian tones Tuesday as he announced the partial nationalization of nine major American banks. He was partly right, though not in the way he meant his ...
October 17, 2008

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 claimed to embrace. (Aside: I say supposed ...
October 10, 2008

The Pretense of Regulatory Knowledge

Advocates of the free market are sometimes parodied for their seemingly all-purpose answer to any problem: Let the market handle it. What may sound like a simplistic answer, however, is actually the most complex prescription imaginable. In the modern world, the workings of any particular market are ...
October 3, 2008

State Capitalism in Crisis

Let's take a bird's-eye view of what the Bush administration, with congressional complicity, proposes to do about the financial problems. The administration wants the authority to spend a minimum of $700 billion buying, among other things, bad mortgage loans -- loans no one else will buy ...
September 26, 2008

State Capitalism in Crisis

Let's take a bird's-eye view of what the Bush administration, with congressional complicity, proposes to do about the financial problems. The administration wants the authority to spend a minimum of $700 billion buying, among other things, bad mortgage loans -- loans no one else will buy ...
September 26, 2008

Government Failure

Pundits and politicians are virtually unanimous in saying today's economic turmoil is the result of a laissez-faire policy in Washington and an orgy of greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street. Some samples: John McCain: "We are going to fight the greed and irresponsibility on Wall Street. ...
September 19, 2008

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 ...
September 12, 2008

The Bastiat Solution

The election season, which -- sigh -- is only just beginning, makes me want to reread Frederic Bastiat's The Law. It is the best antidote for the toxic demagoguery that issues forth from across the political spectrum. While the candidates are busy outcompeting one another in proposing ...
August 29, 2008

Lost in Transcription

Following rules, such as the rules of language, of the market, or of just conduct, is more about "knowing how" than "knowing that." This is a lesson taught by many important thinkers, among them, Gilbert Ryle (who used these terms in the title of chapter 2 of ...
August 22, 2008

Paternalist Nudges

Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein and University of Chicago economics professor Richard Thaler are self-proclaimed "libertarian paternalists." Contradiction in terms? They think not. According to their approach, "[G]overnments try to move people in good directions without imposing penalties, mandates or bans." The part about "moving ...
August 15, 2008

Was the Constitution Really Meant to Constrain the Government?

There's no shortcut to a free society. I find myself repeating this because looking for shortcuts is tempting, and thinking is easily overtaken by wishful thinking. A shortcut favored by most advocates of limited government is restoration of the Constitution. If only we could get back to the Constitution as it ...
August 8, 2008

Hubris in the First Degree

"[A]s president, I will commit two billion dollars each year on clean-coal research and development. We will build the demonstration plants, refine the techniques and equipment, and make clean coal a reality." That's what John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate, said ...
August 1, 2008

Getting Rights Wrong

"This is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence. The Second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed. . . . --United States v. Cruikshank (1876) It's the Fourth of July, the ...
July 5, 2008

The “Stable Bulwark of Our Liberties”

The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday struck a blow for the separation of powers and dealt the Bush administration a big setback by ruling that suspects held without charge at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to contest their imprisonment under the doctrine of habeas corpus. Simply put, the ...
June 13, 2008

Don't Repeal the Sixteenth Amendment!

Surely any champion of freedom wants to get rid of the income tax. And surely the way to really get rid of the income tax is to repeal the Sixteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Right? Wrong. ...
May 23, 2008

Hands Off Windfall Profits

You don't really have to like the oil companies to reject the windfall-profits tax. All you have to know is that if you tax something, you'll get less of it. No one can seriously dispute this piece of common sense. That leaves the strong suspicion that the motive for ...
May 9, 2008

Government Schools and the Housing Mess

The Law of Unintended Consequences is a fascinating thing. You can never be entirely sure what the second-, third-, etc. -order effects of any action will be. This is especially so with government policy because centralized decision-making can do so much damage to so many people. That ought to humble ...
May 2, 2008

Statecraft Is Not Soulcraft

I get nervous when presidential candidates -- or their surrogates -- take up subjects that are clearly none of their business. Actually, most of what they talk about is none of their business. But some things are so far over the line that ...
April 4, 2008

Bailout Hypocrisy

Thud. That was the sound of the other shoe dropping. In response to severe problems in the credit markets, thanks to years of government intervention, the Federal Reserve--the government's counterfeiter and chief culprit in the current crisis--has opened its discount window to the investment banks. Interest rate: 2.5 percent. Until recently, ...
March 28, 2008

The State Is Morally Hazardous to Your Health

It's never been more important for advocates of individual liberty to emphasize that what is failing today is not the free market but the state. To claim otherwise, as so many people do, is to ignore generations of pervasive and deep-seated government interference with the marketplace. A brief article can't ...
March 21, 2008

Big Brother Really Is Watching

I've been reading the news about soon-to-be-ex-New York Governor Eliot Spitzer with mixed feelings. Yes, mixed. On the one hand, there is something satisfying in seeing an insufferably self-righteous, politically ambitious, ham-handed, and ethically challenged former prosecutor lose his grip on power because he did ...
March 14, 2008

Are the Voters Qualified to Pick a President?

The big political buzz is over whether John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama are qualified to be president. The voters are expected to decide, but are they qualified to do that? Don't bet on it. How would voters know who is up to this job? They might try ...
March 7, 2008

Health-Care Cons

The economist Joan Robinson (1903-1983) wrote, The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of readymade answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists. A better reason to study economics is to avoid being deceived by politicians; they are the ...
February 29, 2008

The Crazy Arithmetic of Voting

The hoopla over Super Tuesday reminded me of an essay I read long ago by Bruno Leoni (1913-1967), an Italian legal scholar and great champion of liberty. I've been meaning to discuss the many important themes in his book, Freedom and the Law (expanded third edition), ...
February 8, 2008

Where Free-Market Economists Go Wrong

As the stimulus juggernaut steams through Congress, advocates of freedom would profit by studying the case closely. Try not to get depressed by the spectacle. Politics, alas, trumps economics. There's nothing new in that, but we ought to learn some lessons and adjust our strategy accordingly. Newspaper accounts make ...
February 1, 2008

An Unstimulating Idea

It's like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end. Funny thing -- the water in the shallow end doesn't get any deeper. That's how George Mason University economist Russell Roberts describes the logic -- ...
January 25, 2008

Those Too-Consistent Libertarians

The writer Michael Kinsley is very intelligent. He is also very glib, and his glibness often gets in the way of his intelligence. The expression too clever by half could have been coined for him. You can see this when he writes about the libertarian philosophy, as ...
January 18, 2008

“Meet the New Boss. Same as the Old Boss”

FEE has long stayed above the electoral fray, and for darn good reasons. Politics is a poor forum for serious discussion of political philosophy and economics. Complicated ideas don't fit well into sound bites, and the news media and learned pundits are too busy interpreting the latest ...
January 11, 2008

Paul Krugman, Doctor of (Bad) Economics

Paul Krugman, the New York Times op-ed writer, has a Ph.D. in economics. Those three magic letters give him an air of authority, as if they represent a valuable accomplishment, yet somehow he manages to consistently give bad economic advice in his twice-weekly column. ...
January 4, 2008

A Matter of Priorities

'Tis the political season, which means the season to bash immigrants. This goes especially for so-called illegal aliens, i.e., residents without government papers. (As if that's a big deal.) Candidates and others who are so set on securing the Mexican border -- the Canadian ...
December 14, 2007

Bad Partisanship Drives Out Good

People routinely bemoan excessive political partisanship in America. You can hardly look at an op-ed page or cable news-talk show without encountering this complaint. A lot can be chalked up to the Myth of the Golden Age, the belief that we live in terrible times ...
November 30, 2007

Individualism, Collectivism, and Other Murky Labels

Imagine the following person. He believes all individuals should be free to do anything that's peaceful and therefore favors private property, free global markets, freedom of contract, civil liberties, and all the related ideas that come under the label libertarianism (or liberalism). Obviously he is not a ...
November 16, 2007

Ersatz School Choice

Vouchers go down in crushing defeat That headline thundered from Wednesday's Salt Lake City Tribune, as it announced that more than 60 percent of Utahans who voted on whether to uphold the statewide school-voucher program said no. It was a big setback for the voucher movement. The ...
November 9, 2007

Virtue versus Legal Obligation

Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter and policy adviser to President George W. Bush, is the latest in a long line of political writers who fail to see the distinction between a virtue and an enforceable legal obligation. Missing that difference leads to all sorts of mischief and ...
November 2, 2007

Liberty and Political Obedience

Last week I discussed Anthony de Jasay's claim (expressed here) that the freedom philosophy -- liberalism -- is precarious because it has always been rather loose, tolerant of heterogeneous components, easy to influence, open to infiltration by alien ideas that are in fact inconsistent with any coherent ...
October 26, 2007

What Nearly Killed Liberalism

The shifting meaning of the word liberal in the direction of statism has been analyzed often. I've done it myself here. But a few years ago Anthony de Jasay wrote a short comment on the matter that deserves attention. For Mr. de Jasay, the problem is ...
October 19, 2007

Atlas Shrugged and the Corporate State

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Ayn Rand's stunning novel, Atlas Shrugged. So many words have been written about the book that the task of saying something new is daunting. It is a celebration of the creativity that is required for ...
October 12, 2007

Government Failure

A popular academic rationalization for having government forcibly override people's economic decisions is the theory of market failure. Advocates of the free market have long emphasized that the countless self-regarding actions individuals perform daily in the marketplace generate a larger complex spontaneous, or undesigned, order ...
October 5, 2007

Pundit in Wonderland

When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less. --Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass In one of those boilerplate articles about the deteriorating American middle class, Washington Post ...
September 28, 2007

A Chip Off Old Big Brother's Block

Late last month the California Senate and Assembly sent Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger a bill to prohibit employers from requiring workers to have RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips implanted under their skin. North Dakota and Wisconsin already have passed similar laws. Two other states are considering bans. ...
September 21, 2007

Force Fetishists

Why is it that every few years some prominent newspaper or magazine publishes a critical article about the freedom philosophy (libertarianism) that rests on the same confusion over two key but simple concepts? Such confusion should have been dispelled by 1875 when Lysander Spooner, the colorful ...
September 14, 2007

The Nation as an Object of Service

What distinguishes the libertarian (liberal) spirit from its alternative is the conviction that free individuals who respect one another's sovereignty will generate and sustain a benevolent prosperous social order without direction from a central bureaucratic authority. Atomistic individualism never had anything ...
September 7, 2007

Counterfeit Rights, Cold Bureaucracies

If you were reading with only one eye open or only two hours' sleep you might have thought Paul Krugman had finally stumbled onto the truth. In his Monday New York Times op-ed, A Socialist Plot, he wrote: [M]any American families with middle-class incomes do send their kids ...
August 31, 2007

Bad Policy Drives Out Good

All public policies are related. Okay, that may be a slight overstatement, but there's a point here. A politician's credibility on one public issue -- and thus the disposition of that issue -- will often be determined by his or her position on ...
August 24, 2007

Real Liberalism and the Law of Nature

"Our leaders invent nothing but new taxes, and conquer nothing but the pockets of their subjects." -- Thomas Hodgskin Is government the source of our rights? I fear that today many people would say yes. Not infrequently it is said that the government or the Constitution grants us ...
August 10, 2007

No Substitute for History

The great economist Ludwig von Mises showed that economics can be deduced from the axiom that human beings act: individuals consciously select ends and apply scarce means to achieve them. By examining the logical implications of that undeniable fact, one can come ...
August 3, 2007

Laissez-Faire Anti-Imperialism

[E]xpansion and imperialism are at war with the best traditions, principles, and interests of the American people, and that they will plunge us into a network of difficult problems and political perils, which we might have avoided, while they offer us no corresponding advantage in return. These might be the sentiments ...
July 27, 2007

The Common Sense of “Common Sense”

In January 1776, less than a year into the American War for Independence, Thomas Paine published Common Sense. In John Adams, historian David McCullough writes, In little time more than 100,000 copies were in circulation. In proportion to today's U.S. population, that's equivalent ...
July 20, 2007

Class Struggle Rightly Conceived

Karl Marx is famous for drawing attention to the idea of class struggle. Yet remarkably in 1852, historian David Hart recounts, Marx wrote, "[A]s far as I am concerned, the credit for having discovered the existence and the conflict of classes in modern society does not belong to me. Bourgeois ...
July 13, 2007

Tax Tyranny

If you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes. I hear that's what they say in the Rocky Mountains. I'd like to propose an addendum: If you do like a federal court's tax ruling, wait 11 months. As I've discussed previously, last August a three-judge panel of the ...
July 6, 2007

Last Taxpayer Standing

The popular American folklore that taxpaying citizens are the masters and government the servant might lead one to expect that taxpayers can sue the government when they think it has spent their money in a way that violates their rights. But that's not how the courts see ...
June 29, 2007

America’s Engineer

No president is more despised by opponents of big government than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His New Deal is singularly blamed for introducing large-scale national economic intervention to the United States. But FDR did not drop from the sky. He emerged in a particular context that was shaped ...
June 22, 2007

Habeas Corpus's Fork in the Road

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful ...
June 15, 2007

Illiberal Means, Illiberal Ends

The years 1914-1918 must have been lonely for Randolph Bourne. Bourne was a popular writer in Progressive circles, prolifically turning out articles for The New Republic and Seven Arts magazines. But soon the former, along with other publications, lost interest in his writing and the latter ...
June 8, 2007

A Democracy of Dunces?

When pro-free-market critics of democracy explain why laissez faire is not a winning election issue, they usually say that voters have a no incentive to research economic policy because one vote won't sway the election and the expected payoff to any individual voter is infinitesimal. So they, ...
June 1, 2007

Be Our Guest (Worker)

The so-called guest-worker program, part of the controversial new compromise immigration bill now before Congress, sums up everything that is wrong in how many people think about immigration. On one side are those who want to keep foreigners out of the country on grounds that they will ...
May 25, 2007

Political Science

[I]t would be quite illogical to believe that a scientist may without inconsistency subscribe to any value-position whatsoever.... That provocative sentence is found in an article by Belgian liberal legal scholar Frank Van Dun, published in Reason Papers in 1986 under the title Economics and the ...
May 18, 2007

That Mercantilist Commerce Clause

The Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution has been used to justify a wide expansion of government power, from antidiscrimination laws to drug prohibition to a ban on guns near schools. In objecting to use of the Commerce Clause for such remote purposes, some constitutionalists rely on a ...
May 11, 2007

Anthony de Jasay on Limiting Power

Anthony de Jasay, an occasional contributor to this site and The Freeman (pdf), is a refreshing political thinker. His classic, The State, asks questions few have asked since Thomas Hobbes assured us that swapping freedom for security under Leviathan was a slam dunk. Jasay never ...
May 4, 2007

Labor’s “Right to a Free Market”

No issue is more contentious in labor relations than the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). This bill, now pending in Congress, would require the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to recognize a union when a majority of the employees in a unit appropriate for bargaining has signed ...
April 27, 2007

Progressive Illiberalism

The Progressive movement, which dominated the American scene in the years from the turn of the century to United State entrance in World War I, was not primarily a liberal movement, writes Arthur A. Ekirch Jr. in his magisterial work The Decline of American Liberalism. [I]n contrast ...
April 20, 2007

Caper in the Caucasus

Barreling along a narrow, cratered, sharply winding road in the mountains of Armenia seemed an odd way to promote liberty. But that's what it was. For the bus negotiating the hairpin curves in the cold rain under thick gray clouds carried FEE's team of goodwill ambassadors to ...
April 13, 2007

Jeffersonianism Interred

For historian Arthur A. Ekirch Jr., the decline of American liberalism tracked the rise of nationalism and the corporate state, the intimate alliance between business and government. He equates liberalism -- libertarianism -- with economic freedom and property rights for the common citizen, not just for an ...
March 30, 2007

Arthur Ekirch’s The Decline of American Liberalism

I like revisiting classic, and unfortunately forgotten, works in the (classical) liberal, or libertarian, canon. This pays several dividends. For one, it brings great books to the attention of people who never knew they existed. Moreover, old books often contain insights and information you can find ...
March 23, 2007

Free or Watched?

Unless we wake up, the future is unfolding in Hazleton, Pa. It isn't pretty. Hazleton is home to one of the first local crackdowns on illegal aliens -- whom I prefer to think of as migrants without government papers. Last summer, under the leadership of Mayor Lou Barletta, ...
March 16, 2007

Free to Migrate

No matter what the advocates of free immigration say about the natural individual right to move without government permission, many people remain unconvinced because they expect theory and practice to diverge. Open borders may be good in the abstract, we're told, but the theory doesn't reflect what happens ...
March 9, 2007

Religion in the Schools

No matter how good many private schools are, in one crucial respect they can never be equal to the government's schools: they aren't government schools. To libertarians this is good thing. But to many people it is a fatal flaw. For such people modern statism, sometimes called democracy, ...
March 2, 2007

Made Everywhere

The Commerce Department (whose idea was that?) said last week that 2006 was another record year for the U.S. trade deficit. The value of imports beat the value of exports by $764 billion. That makes five record years in a row. China's trade surplus with us ...
February 23, 2007

The Rent-Seeking Habit

Wal-Mart's CEO and his chief nemesis, the head of the Service Employees International Union, have joined forces. They recently appeared together at a news conference to endorse universal health care, sugared words for medicine by coercive bureaucracy. No, this is not another article about why a government-based ...
February 16, 2007

Health Hazard

Back in the days before America had an income tax (yes, son, I've read there really was such a time), proposals to impose the tax were met with warnings that it would be inquisitorial. Opponents apparently didn't also see its potential for manipulating behavior. But what more ...
February 9, 2007

Inequality Matters

In the controversy now raging over whether income inequality in America is growing a lot or a little, some pro-market people say it doesn't much matter. This attitude is unjustified, not to mention harmful to the cause of individual freedom because it misses the bigger picture. For ...
February 2, 2007

Lost Articles

The Constitution says that to be elected to the U.S. Senate, a person has to be 30 or older, a citizen for at least nine years, and a resident of the state from which the candidate is elected. Alas, it says nothing about knowing American history. Good thing for Sen. ...
January 26, 2007

“Congressional Generosity” and the Power to Tax

Every now and then we get a glimpse into what government officials really think about our rights to life, liberty, and property. The U.S. Justice Department recently provided such a glimpse in a controversial tax case, Murphy v. IRS. How revealing it is! Did you know that if the government ...
January 19, 2007

Pleasing Consumers Isn’t Easy

I love electronic gadgets -- not just for their functionality or the toy factor, important as those things are. (Ideally, a good gadget combines both.) I also love them because, for me, they underscore the market's uncertainty and consumer orientation. I'm an unabashed high-tech-gadget market watcher. Here's what's fascinating. People want ...
January 12, 2007

Extortion in Port Chester

The least appreciated form of tyranny in the United States goes by the names redevelopment and government-business partnership. While everyone knows about the threat of development-oriented eminent domain, thanks to the 2005 Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. New London (pdf), local tyranny goes much deeper than the mere taking ...
January 5, 2007

Trans-Fattened Government

So people dining out in New York City will be protected from unwittingly -- or even wittingly -- consuming foods containing trans fats. Trans fats are what you get with partially hydrogenated oils and shortenings, which keep foods like French fries from getting soggy and margarine solid at room temperature. Trans ...
December 15, 2006

Global Warming and the Layman

Global warming is a divisive issue. People are either believers or skeptics, with each side viewing the other with apprehension. I've sided firmly with the skeptics, but lately I have had a nagging concern. Like most people, I am not an atmospheric scientist. I have no firsthand way to evaluate ...
December 8, 2006

How Washington Works

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial nicely illustrates how Washington works. The Bush administration has been pushing for a measure to normalize trade relations with Vietnam. (Normalize is a Washington term that does not mean free trade.) Congress said no just as President Bush was preparing to visit that country ...
December 1, 2006

Economic Nationalism, Enemy of the People

With the 2006 election, America appears to have reached the tipping point on free trade. . . . Anxiety, and fear of jobs lost to India and China, seems a more powerful emotion than gratitude for the inexpensive goods at Wal-Mart. The bribe Corporate America has offered Working America -- ...
November 17, 2006

Mixed Day at the Polls

Americans went to the polls on Tuesday not just to pick legislators and governors but also to vote directly on policies. The results were mixed. By and large people voted thumbs up on the minimum wage and thumbs down on eminent domain for private use. About half the states in the ...
November 10, 2006

Economists Against Economics

Five economists who either won the Nobel Prize in economics or who served as president of the American Economic Association -- and three who did both -- recently joined over 600 other economists in urging the federal government to increase the minimum wage (pdf). The signatures were gathered by the ...
November 3, 2006

The Libertarian Nobel Peace-Prize Winner

Last week, with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, I underscored the historical-philosophical link between freedom of commerce and peace in classical liberalism. (The article is here.) What I did not know at the time, and what I have since learned thanks ...
October 27, 2006

The Libertarian Nobel Peace-Prize Winner

Last week, with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, I underscored the historical-philosophical link between freedom of commerce and peace in classical liberalism. (The article is here.) What I did not know at the time, and what I have since learned thanks ...
October 27, 2006

Peace and Free Trade: “One and the Same Cause”

The Nobel Peace Prize this year went to a different sort of activist. Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economics professor, and his Grameen Bank won the prize for pioneering the concept of microcredit, small loans made to poor producers who because they lack collateral can't get conventional bank loans. Lasting peace ...
October 20, 2006

History Lesson Lost

Call me nostalgic, but I still have a thing for the Articles of Confederation. Maybe it's the enticement of forbidden fruit. In the government schools I attended little if anything was said about the eight years during which the United States of America were governed under the Articles. The curriculum ...
October 6, 2006

Eye on the Ball

Like clockwork, the New York Times has produced another page-one story purporting to show that living standards for many Americans have fallen, this time because wages in recent years have failed to keep up with inflation. This has been happening, write Times reporters Steven Greenhouse and David Leonhardt, despite rising ...
September 1, 2006

Double Standard

When the market (apparently) fails, choruses immediately sing out for a government takeover of the particular function. When government fails, do we ever hear calls for a takeover by the competitive sector? Almost never. Government departments routinely fail to achieve their stated goals. (Forty years and many trillions of dollars ...
August 25, 2006

The Constitution Within

In recent columns I've argued that a free society depends ultimately on people having a proper sense of just conduct. This means more than the words they recite or put on paper. Most crucial is how they act and expect others to act. For this reason it is futile ...
August 18, 2006

Where Is the Constitution?

The question in the title is not like Who's buried in Grant's tomb? The answer isn't the National Archives. I mean the real constitution -- the set of attitudes that reflect what Americans people will accept as legitimate actions by the people in government. Those tacit rules are the real ...
July 28, 2006

For Equality; Against Privilege

The freedom philosophy can be boiled down to two phrases: for equality, against privilege. Intuitively, this should sound uncontroversial. We just finished celebrating the Fourth of July, which commemorates the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson's elegant statement of the freedom philosophy proclaims: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all ...
July 7, 2006
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