All Posts Tagged With: "corruption"

Influence-Peddling

Since the New York Times published its page-one story alleging an inappropriate link between Senator John McCain and telecommunications lobbyist Vicki Iseman, we’ve heard much more about the evil of “influence-peddling.” The day the Times story ran, Senator Barack Obama debated Hillary Clinton, saying, “Washington has become a place where good ideas go to die. [...]

1May2008 | | 0 comments | Continued

Detroit’s Flirtation with Economic Suicide

Until recently, I had thought the city of Detroit had done everything in its power to drive people and businesses away. I was wrong. From deep down in its barrel of apparently endless crackpot schemes, the Detroit city council pulled out one more. And what a piece of work it was—proof beyond the most shadowy [...]

1Mar2005 | | 1 comment | Continued

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics

As this is being written, the television talking heads are imploring us “not to walk away” from Afghanistan and to “invest” billions there instead. Before buying into that idea, everyone should read this book by a former World Bank economist whose forthrightness has evidently cost him his job. Early on, Easterly makes the following observation [...]

16Mar2003 | | 0 comments | Continued

Privatizing Airline Safety and Security

The events of 9/11 underscore the importance of improving the safety and security of air travel. The government’s response to the terrorist attacks employs a command-and-control approach. That approach ought to be questioned. After all, it was the Federal Aviation Administration’s system that failed on 9/11. Why should we expect additional controls to be more [...]

1Nov2002 | | 4 comments | Continued

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 [...]

1Sep2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

Unfree Speech: The Folly of Campaign Finance Reform by Bradley A. Smith

Princeton University Press • 2001 • 304 pages • $26.95 Reviewed by John Samples Responding to Watergate, Congress a generation ago passed draconian restrictions on campaign spending and fundraising. The Supreme Court eventually struck down the spending limits, but affirmed contribution ceilings and the legality of the new agency empowered to oversee the regulatory regime, [...]

1Jun2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Rule of Law and Freedom in Emerging Democracies: A Madisonian Perspective

James Dorn is vice president for academic affairs at the Cato Institute. The collapse of communism in 1989 in Eastern and Central Europe, and the fall of the Soviet Union two years later, have increased the number of democracies in the world to a total of 120. Of those, however, only 85 are classified as [...]

1Aug2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

Public Money for Private Charity

After years of being shunned and even persecuted, Christians suddenly enjoyed the official blessing of the Roman state when Emperor Constantine came to power in 324 A.D. For the first time, imperial funds were used to subsidize priests and churches. Christians emerged from hiding in Rome’s catacombs to partake of the state’s largess. A faith that might have saved an empire was thus corrupted and in the end proved to be a futile safeguard against Rome’s ultimate destruction at the hands of barbarians a century and a half later.

1Aug2001 | | 3 comments | Continued

The Miracle of Privatization

When I was a small boy I used to bicycle in the hills of northwest England where Derbyshire and Cheshire meet. In the distance I could often see glimpses of water, but all roads to it were blocked by locked gates and signs reading “Public Property: Keep Out.” Today, following the privatization of the water [...]

1Sep2000 | | 1 comment | Continued

Campaign-Finance Reform Will End Corruption?

People with an investment in government power will torture logic like a medieval inquisitor rather than face the facts. Consider campaign-finance reform. The standard reformist wisdom is that campaign contributions corrupt the democratic process: Candidates need money to run for office. Corporations and wealthy folks offer to provide the money in return for favors when [...]

1May2000 | | 1 comment | Continued

President Grant Reconsidered

In almost all polls of U.S. presidents, Ulysses S. Grant ranks near the bottom. Professor Thomas Bailey of Stanford, in a typical evaluation, writes, “Grant was an ignorant and confused President, and his eight long years in blunderland are generally regarded as a national disgrace.” Frank Scaturro, an attorney with a strong interest in this [...]

1Nov1999 | | 0 comments | Continued

Mafia Capitalism or Red Legacy?

Gary Dempsey is a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. Aaron Lukas is an analyst at Cato’s Center for Trade Policy Studies. Russia is experiencing an organized crime epidemic. Its interior ministry says there are now more than 9,000 criminal organizations operating inside the country, employing nearly 100,000 people, or about [...]

1Aug1998 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Idiocy of Autocracy

In any dictatorship, the biggest fool is the dictator. It takes a prodigious amount of self-deception to believe you are running a country. I was reminded of that as I heard about Fidel Castro’s preparations for the Pope’s visit to Cuba last winter. In an interview on Cuban television, Castro said he didn’t think the [...]

1Jun1998 | | 0 comments | Continued

There’s Some Good in Gouging

Karen Selick is an attorney in Ontario, Canada, and a columnist for Canadian Lawyer The great ice storm of January 1998 left millions of residents of Quebec and eastern Ontario in Canada (and in the northeastern United States) without electrical power, some for several weeks. The storm itself was unprecedented, but it brought with it [...]

1Apr1998 | | 0 comments | Continued

Why Laws Backfire

Ms. Manley is president of Commercial Tenant Real Estate Representation Ltd., Manhattan. Her articles have appeared in Harvard Business Review, Inc., and the Wall Street Journal. For thousands of years, laws everywhere have backfired. In ancient Babylon, Sumeria, Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome, for instance, price controls promoted not fairness but famine. During the twentieth [...]

1Aug1996 | | 1 comment | Continued

Business–Government Collusion

Mr. Banfield is owner of Banfield Analytical Services in Westmont, Illinois. As an adjunct policy analyst for the Heartland Institute, he has testified before the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, The Illinois General Assembly, and a U.S. Republican Hearing on health-care reform. Back when first cutting my teeth on the concepts of free-market economics, I [...]

1Feb1995 | | 11 comments | Continued

The Fall of the Ivory Tower: Government Funding, Corruption, and the Bankrupting of Higher Education

This book picks up where Dinesh D’Souza leaves off. Not only has political correctness reached epidemic proportions in higher education, but so have mismanagement, waste, and corruption. The cause: a long history of expanding government involvement which has created a class of dependents whose lust for easy money is matched only by their irresponsibility. Roche [...]

1Jan1995 | | 1 comment | Continued
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