All Posts Tagged With: "big government"
Government the Job Killer
President Obama says government will have to build the nation out of the economic trough. “We’re the country that built the intercontinental railroad,” Obama says. “So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads?” I guess Obama doesn’t know that the transcontinental railroad was a Solyndra-like Big Government scandal. The [...]
4Jan2012 | John Stossel | 4 comments | ContinuedKeynesianism Doesn’t Mean Bigger Government?
The debate over what John Maynard Keynes “really” meant by the theories he put forward in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money has been going on almost since it was published in 1936. The release of the second Hayek-Keynes hip-hop video brought this debate back to a boil. For example, in a May [...]
30Nov2011 | Steven Horwitz | 4 comments | ContinuedTen Years After
After 9/11 the U.S. Congress created the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). America went to war, overtly and covertly, in several countries. Nearly $8 trillion was spent on what is called “security,” Chris Hellman of the National Priorities Project estimates. Was it worth it? Yes, in many ways, says author [...]
30Nov2011 | John Stossel | 4 comments | ContinuedBack on the Road to Serfdom: The Resurgence of Statism
Since the housing bubble burst in 2007, America’s social and economic troubles have mounted rapidly. Unemployment remains high, saving and investment low. The federal government is desperate to suck in enough money to pay its enormous tab for welfare and warfare a bit longer. Our politics have become increasingly vicious. About two-thirds of the people [...]
30Nov2011 | George C. Leef | 2 comments | ContinuedLibertarianism Today
Libertarianism is attracting more attention than ever. As the economic and social damage done by Leviathan increases exponentially Americans are coming to understand that government power is the root of our many troubles. The idea that a consistent philosophy based on freedom and peaceful cooperation among all people is the only path out of the [...]
26Oct2011 | George C. Leef | 5 comments | ContinuedRhetoric, Reality, and the Recession
Progressives seem unable to distinguish between the rhetoric of the Bush administration and its reality.
20Oct2011 | Steven Horwitz | 12 comments | ContinuedTyranny 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 | ContinuedWhat Do We Mean by “Big Government”?
The scale of government matters, but we cannot get so tangled up in debates about the size of federal government expenditures that we overlook the effects of changes in the scope of government power.
25Aug2011 | Steven Horwitz | 6 comments | ContinuedQuestion of the Day
Why do people never say with respect to government: “Too big to fail is too big”?
25Jul2011 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Modern Union versus Workers’ Rights
The raging controversy in Wisconsin over eliminating collective bargaining “rights” for government employees cast a bright and harsh light on public-sector unions. Some commentators have distinguished public-sector unions from private-sector unions, but the vested interests of the two are much the same. Both are expressions of what might be called “the modern union,” which came [...]
22Jun2011 | Wendy McElroy | 4 comments | Continued“Big Meat” and Big Government
Ranchers are a fairly independent bunch. We don’t like overweening authority and prefer to fend for ourselves. We also find few things more objectionable than sitting endlessly indoors. Nevertheless, 2,000 of us did just that several months ago in the ballroom of Colorado State University. Our ballroom session wasn’t very romantic, I’m afraid. While most [...]
25May2011 | Paul Schwennesen | 0 comments | ContinuedIdeological and Political Underpinnings of the Great Society
The surge of federal economic interventions that occurred during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency—the much-ballyhooed Great Society, whose centerpiece was the War on Poverty—differed from the four preceding surges, each of which had been sparked by war or economic depression. No national emergency prevailed when Johnson took office following John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, [...]
24Feb2011 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Most Dangerous Derivative
In the October 1962 issue of The Freeman an obscure 28-year-old lawyer wrote, in one of his first published works, “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 in principle.” The [...]
22Oct2010 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedThere’s Too Little Trust in Government?
There is one point on which I can unequivocally agree with E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s, column “Can We Reverse the Tide on Government Distrust?”: “So far, the Obama administration has missed the opportunity to demonstrate . . . how it is changing the way government works. How is its approach to . . . regulations [...]
22Oct2010 | Charles Johnson | 2 comments | ContinuedAlexander Hamilton and the Perils of State Capitalism
Historians have long praised Alexander Hamilton’s activist government promotion of capitalism. Hamilton’s “financial revolution” brought secure government debt, fluid securities markets, and a modern banking system to the United States. Most scholars believe these factors were responsible for the amazing growth of the U.S. economy in the subsequent 200 years. Thus while George Washington is [...]
25Aug2010 | and Tyler Watts | 7 comments | ContinuedLaw, Morality, and Big Government
James Dorn of the Cato Institute, whose article “The Rise of Government and the Decline of Morality” appears in the July/August Freeman, discusses his theme in this Cato Daily Podcast.
17Aug2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedWhy Not More Liberty?
There are two extreme views of American government and the political process. One is that policy is the result of special interests rigging the system in their favor and exploiting the ignorant or at least impotent masses. The other is that government pretty much gives the people what they want. My own view is much [...]
5Jul2010 | Russell Roberts | 0 comments | Continued-
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