Big Insurance Wins One from Obama

Barack Obama this morning unveiled his plan for overhauling the health insurance industry in an effort to get the stalled legislative process going again. The bill was just posted on the White House website (Putting Americans in Control of Their Health Care” [!]). Here’s the first detail to jump out, according to the Wall Street [...]

Getting in Deeper

In what the Wall Street Journal calls “a watershed moment for government intervention in the private sector,” the Federal Reserve announced in October that it will regulate executive compensation at all banks so they will not have incentives to take on too much risk. Meanwhile, the Obama administration said it would cut by half (on [...]

Book Reviews – June 2007

• Hitlers Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State
  
  by Goetz Aly Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
  
• The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money
  by Timothy P. Carney Reviewed by Sheldon Richman
  
• Income and Wealth
  by Alan Reynolds Reviewed by George C. Leef
  
• The Sarbanes-Oxley Debacle What We Have Learned; How to Fix It
  by Henry N. Butler and Larry E. Ribstein Reviewed by Barbara Hunter
  
• The Joy of SOX: Why Sarbanes-Oxley and Service-Oriented Architecture May Be the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You
  by Hugh Taylor Reviewed by Barbara Hunter
  

The Disconnect Between Political Promises and Performance

What can politicians do to create more higher paying jobs? Politicians must think that most of us believe the answer is: a lot. One of the most persistent campaign promises is the creation of good jobs at good wages. I shall argue that politicians can do quite a number of things to increase high-wage employment. [...]

Government and Business Are the Same?

“Let us now praise slothful, inefficient, bloated government,” reads the opening of an April 30 Washington Post essay, “When the Blue Chips Are Down, in Gov We Trust.” “Let us now rejoice in the glory of your trillions of tax dollars at work.” Why are we rejoicing? Because staff writer Paul Farhi intends to show [...]

Immigration: An Abolitionist’s Cause

One of the most frequent arguments used against opening borders is that it would add to the welfare burden of the state and that innocent taxpayers will be compelled to pay for slothful immigrants. Slothful immigrants? Students in my international trade and finance classes always get a good laugh at the notion of “slothful immigrants.” [...]

Second-Guessing the Market

John Sparks is chairman of the department of business administration, economics, and international management at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. We commonly think of people below the poverty line as the only beneficiaries of welfare. But poor families are not the sole recipients of government money. Some of America’s largest and most successful companies get [...]

Ax Business Welfare and Privatize Social Security

Doug Bandow, a nationally syndicated columnists, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author and editor of several books, including Tripwire: Korea and U.S. Foreign Policy in a Changed World. The president and Congress have promised a balanced budget by 2002, but a recent poll found that just 17 percent of Americans [...]