Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses

In his previous book, The Big Ripoff (reviewed in the June 2007 Freeman), author Timothy Carney launched an attack on two of America’s preeminent political myths—that the Democrats are “the party of the little guy” and the Republicans are “the party of free enterprise.” Both notions are useful to candidates in the endless quest for [...]

Politics Corrupts Money

In September the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the heated battle over campaign finance reform legislation—the so-called Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, or BCRA. That law, passed by Congress and signed by President Bush in 2002, has been challenged by a wide array of parties, including such strange bedfellows as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce [...]

The Other Political Story

Unfortunately, last year’s presidential election was a mess. Unfortunately, the congressional elections were not.

While it proved difficult to determine who won the presidency, it was not difficult to determine who controlled Congress. Only six House incumbents lost, yielding a re-election rate of 98.5 percent.

Regulatory Extortion

Thomas DiLorenzo is a professor of economics at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland. This article is based on a presentation prepared for the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s conference, “Austrian Economics and the Financial Markets,” last September in Toronto. In 1978 Michael Jensen and William Meckling, writing in the Financial Analysts Journal, offered an extraordinarily gloomy [...]

High Plains Drifters: Politicians’ Lucrative Protection Racket

Fred McChesney teaches at Cornell Law School and is the author of Money for Nothing: Politicians, Rent Extraction and Political Extortion (Harvard University Press, 1997). “Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs.” —P. J. O’Rourke The idea that politicians sell special favors to special interests [...]