All Posts Tagged With: "economic development"
Population Control Nonsense
According to an American Dream article, “Al Gore, Agenda 21 and Population Control,” there are too many of us and it has a negative impact on the earth. Here’s what the United Nations Population Fund said in its annual State of the World Population Report for 2009, “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate”: [...]
30Nov2011 | Walter E. Williams | 10 comments | ContinuedA Simple Solution
There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong. —H. L. Mencken I have devised a simple plan for improving Americans’ health by drastically reducing everyone’s weight, thereby significantly increasing longevity and reducing medical costs. All we need to do is revalue the pound. Instead of a pound being [...]
24Aug2011 | Richard W. Fulmer | 1 comment | ContinuedWhich Strategy Really Ended the Great Depression?
“World War II got us out of the Great Depression.” Many people said that during the war, and some still do today. The quality of American life, however, was precarious during the war. Food was rationed, luxuries removed, taxes high, and work dangerous. A recovery that does not make—as Robert Higgs points out in Depression, [...]
24Aug2011 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 6 comments | ContinuedMust a Formal Legal System Come Before Prosperity?
Capital Letters It was disheartening to read John Stossel’s uncritical endorsement of Hernando de Soto’s diagnosis of the causes of poverty in Third World nations as their lack of street addresses and legal titles to property (“Why Do the Poor Stay Poor?,” March 2011). The error of these claims in De Soto’s The Mystery of [...]
25May2011 | Foundation for Economic Education | 0 comments | ContinuedMaking Poor Nations Rich: Entrepreneurship and the Process of Economic Development
During the 2008 presidential campaign, a critic of then-candidate Barack Obama stated in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, “If he becomes president, I hope he hires some economists who understand why Great Britain, China, Hong Kong and South Korea all prospered when they let private industry rather than government allocate their country’s resources.” [...]
22Oct2010 | Robert Batemarco | 1 comment | 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 | ContinuedDéjà vu All Over Again
“[A]ll things recur eternally. . . .” ––Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra Sometimes I think Nietzsche was right. It happens when I read things like this from the New York Times last January: “An international team sponsored by the United Nations proposed a detailed, ambitious plan on Monday that it says could halve extreme poverty and [...]
8Jul2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedRamon Diaz and the Spread of Liberal Ideas in Uruguay
Uruguay, a country of approximately 68,000 square miles located between two giants, Argentina and Brazil, was one of the most prosperous Latin American countries at the beginning of the twentieth century. Today, its GDP ranks low on the continent, amounting to $11 billion in 2003. A brief overview of its history will explain this decline. [...]
4Jul2010 | Luisa Peirano | 5 comments | ContinuedThe Power of Freedom: Uniting Human Rights and Development
Jean-Pierre Chauffour, an economic adviser at the World Bank, constructs a framework within which human rights and economic development are mutually consistent. His book is a response to policymakers and academics who view economic development as a “fundamental right” calling for government intervention; it demonstrates that the policy prescriptions derived from their ideas are counterproductive [...]
20Apr2010 | Rosemary Fike | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Political Economy of John Taylor of Caroline
As noted in the May Freeman, American revolutionaries mixed classical-republican and liberal political languages somewhat indiscriminately. Republicanism posited a relation between power and property in which independent proprietors were the bulwark of liberty. English critics of post-1688 Whig mercantilism deployed republican ideas, leading many historians to paint them as “agrarians” resisting capitalism, modernization, and social [...]
1Jun2008 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 0 comments | ContinuedThe End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
By Jeffrey D. Sachs Reviewed by Jude Blanchette
1Mar2007 | FEE Admin | 1 comment | ContinuedCentral Planning Comes to Main Street
Steven Greenhut (sgreenhut@ocregister.com) is senior editorial writer and columnist at the Orange County Register in Santa Ana, Calif. He is author of Abuse of Power: How the Government Misuses Eminent Domain. A casual reader could be forgiven for skimming through a front-page Los Angeles Times article from February 12 and thinking that the story was [...]
1Aug2006 | Steven Greenhut | 1 comment | ContinuedThe History of “Underdevelopment”
Perhaps the most important feature of the modern world is its sustained, intensive economic growth. This produces most of the other distinctive features of modernity. Although there were earlier episodes of such economic efflorescence (to use Jack Goldstones term), it was only with the industrial revolution of late eighteenth-century Britain that it became a permanent and prominent feature of the world economy. Following the advent of this transformative process, questions soon arose elsewhere. The first was that of how to achieve the same kind of growth and dynamism. Soon this led to further questions: why other parts of the world did not show these qualities and why their attempts to do so ended in failure.
1Jun2006 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | ContinuedInstitutions and Development: The Case of China
James Dorn (jdorn@cato.org) is a China specialist and vice president for academic affairs at the Cato Institute. He is coeditor of China’s Future: Constructive Partner or Emerging Threat? (Cato Institute, 2000). An earlier version of this article appeared in Vital Speeches of the Day (November 15, 2005). From a liberal perspective the goal of economic [...]
1Jun2006 | James A. Dorn | 0 comments | ContinuedKelo v. City of New London: Do We Need Eminent Domain for Economic Growth?
The Supreme Court continues to give politicians free rein to trample the rights of individuals except in cases where the justices think that the rights are fundamental. Property rights are not regarded as fundamental, and the Court will accept almost any justification, no matter how nave and intellectually feeble, for government encroachments on them.
1Nov2005 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Supreme Court and the End of Limited Government
The Supreme Court ruling permitting governments
forcibly to transfer property through eminent
domain from one private party to another
for the sake of economic development did not come out
of the blue. Although the Takings Clause in the Fifth
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution specifies “nor shall
private property be taken for public use without just
compensation,” the “Court long ago rejected any literal
requirement that condemned property be put into use
for the general public” (Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff,
1984, cited in the current case, Kelo v. City of New
London).
A Popular Insurrection on Property Rights
The property rights issues that arise constantly in
modern life are always difficult and often
obscure. Most ordinary people understand the
importance of zoning restrictions and environmental
protection in their daily lives.They are also keenly aware
that the state exercises its eminent domain power whenever
it condemns land for a post office or a public highway.
But in general they rightly feel a little intimidated
if asked to understand the inner workings of a legal system
that is dominated at every turn by an impenetrable
jargon that even trained lawyers find it
hard to manipulate.
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