All Posts Tagged With: "central planning"
Unintended Consequences
In two earlier Freeman essays, I explored the idea that “ought implies can” and the role of profits in providing knowledge about how best to serve others. Both insights rely on the foundational idea that intentions and results are not the same thing. Thinking we ought to do something does not mean it will have [...]
24Feb2010 | Steven Horwitz | 31 comments | ContinuedThe State of Obama’s Union
Despite what some popular right-wing talk-show hosts claim, Barack Obama is not pushing Marxism, revolutionary or otherwise. He’s pushing good old American progressive-corporate elitism.
29Jan2010 | Sheldon Richman | 23 comments | ContinuedDangerous Historical Myths
One of the most powerful influences on human affairs is historical myth—beliefs about the past that are simply wrong. Some historical myths have far-reaching and baleful effects because they shape the way people understand not only the past but also the present, leading them to make harmful or even dangerous decisions. This seems to be [...]
5Jan2010 | Stephen Davies | 6 comments | ContinuedFrom 1944 to Nineteen Eighty-Four
A longer version of this article appears here. 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. Both valued freedom, though they understood it differently. Orwell, a man of the “left,” could not remain silent in the [...]
18Nov2009 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedTwo Decades Since the Fall
Perspective Two Decades Since the Fall On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall effectively ceased to exist. Remember the sequence: Communist Hungary started letting people pass into Austria and to freedom. Captives of the Soviet bloc left in droves. East Germans, too—thousands of them. The Hungarian government tried to stanch the flow, but the dam [...]
23Oct2009 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedCompetition Would Save Medicine, Too
Competition so regularly brings us better stuff—cars, phones, shoes, medicine—that we’ve come to expect it. We complain on the rare occasion the supermarket doesn’t carry a particular ice-cream flavor. We just assume the store will have 30,000 items, that it will be open 24/7, and that the food will be fresh and cheap. I take [...]
19Aug2009 | John Stossel | 11 comments | ContinuedFDR’s Lucky Timing
It’s not clear how any of FDR’s 1933 policies could have accounted for a 17 percent increase in GDP, even if they promoted expansion, because they wouldn’t have had time to ripple through the economy. It seems more likely that FDR had the good fortune to come into office near the bottom of the Depression, and enough adjustments in wages, prices, and other factors had occurred that the economy was ready to recover.
10Jun2009 | Jim Powell | 5 comments | ContinuedInclined to Liberty: The Futile Attempt to Suppress the Human Spirit
Some people, writes Louis Carabini, are naturally “inclined to liberty.” That is, their thoughts revolve around voluntary action to accomplish their objectives and solve problems. As a Freeman reader, you are probably such an individual. On the other hand, there are many others who are instinctively drawn to coercion to accomplish their objectives and solve [...]
21May2009 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedGovernment Fundamentalism
Many free-market economists like me are quite willing to admit that markets don’t work perfectly and to examine and accept government solutions if their advocates can show how governments can be motivated to actually carry them out. And yet we are called market fundamentalists. On the other hand, many people who call us that are unwilling to change any of their views about the efficacy of government intervention no matter how badly the intervention works. Who are the fundamentalists here?
21May2009 | David R. Henderson | 16 comments | ContinuedFortune Tellers and Planners, Public and Private
Above all we should remember that government is no wiser and in many ways less well informed than private actors.
21May2009 | Stephen Davies | 1 comment | ContinuedHigher Education in America: Individualism or Central Planning?
In education individual decisions are determinative. Each person (for children, with the assistance of parents) is able to choose the best kind and the ideal duration of education. That is why it’s foolish to talk about the “national education level” as too low or too high. There is no “national level.” If any individual should decide that he would benefit from more education, he will act accordingly. There is no more need for government action here than on the “national fitness level” or “national artistic level.”
21May2009 | George C. Leef | 3 comments | ContinuedWhat We Believe
The Foundation for Economic Education, publisher of this magazine since 1956, is now in its seventh decade, and I am now in my seventh month as its president. As we expand the outreach of our programs and publications, now is a good time to remind our readers who we are and what we believe in. [...]
2Mar2009 | Lawrence W. Reed | 8 comments | ContinuedHow Land-Use Planning Benefits Big Business Over Small
It is widely recognized that central-government attempts to completely plan economies (that is, totally eliminate private property rights) are destined to fail. But even lower levels of government can have debilitating impacts on an economy by undermining private property rights through planning and regulation. Indeed, as urban-policy analyst Sam Staley explains, the implications of the [...]
1May2008 | Bruce L. Benson | 2 comments | ContinuedHierarchy or the Market
In an article in last June’s Freeman, I applied some ideas from the socialist-calculation debate to the private corporation and examined the extent to which it is an island of calculational chaos in the market economy. I’d like to expand that line of analysis now and apply some common free-market insights on knowledge and incentives [...]
1Apr2008 | Kevin A. Carson | 2 comments | ContinuedSprawl versus Coastal Beauty
Timothy Terrell is an associate professor of economics at Wofford College in South Carolina. “It’s a bad idea to turn the whole future of a region over only to people with money to make.” So says a local college professor, John Lane, in a recent editorial in one of our community newspapers. The article described [...]
1Jun2007 | Timothy Terrell | 0 comments | ContinuedA Government Program for All
My economics students often ask why, if the economic theory I present is correct, there is so much intervention in the economy. It reminds me of an observation made by Henry Hazlitt in Economics in One Lesson: It is often sadly remarked that the bad economists present their errors to the public better than the [...]
1Dec2006 | Paul Cwik | 2 comments | ContinuedKeynesian Economics and Constitutional Government
Last month 650 economists called for an increase in the federal minimum wage, saying it was the responsibility of the government to “improve the well-being of low-wage workers” by mandating the terms under which people may be employed. Among these economists were five recipients of the Nobel Prize in economics. One of them was Lawrence [...]
1Nov2006 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued-
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