All Posts Tagged With: "economic growth"
Tough on Immigration Is Tough on Economic Growth
Not to be outdone by Arizona’s tough immigration law of 2010, Alabama and Georgia legislators passed their own immigration bills in 2011. The bills received a great deal of media attention because they were widely touted as good for growth and job creation, and were harsher on illegal immigrants than Arizona’s law. In a New [...]
4Jan2012 | Scott Beaulier | 21 comments | ContinuedA Return to Gold?
“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalist System was to debauch the currency. . . . Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society. . . .The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the [...]
30Nov2011 | and John L. Chapman | 13 comments | ContinuedThe Importance of Failure
In today’s society failure has become something to fear, avoid, and therefore prevent at all costs. Whether it is unemployment compensation, farm subsidies, or bailouts for failing companies, the world seems to view failure as having no redeeming social value. If success is all good and failure is all bad, then it seems as though [...]
26Oct2011 | and Steven Horwitz | 11 comments | ContinuedTaxation Is the Lifeblood of the State
The cliffhanger debate over whether or not to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling threw U.S. fiscal policy into brighter relief than it has been in recent memory. Suddenly people were calling for significant cuts in government spending in the face of a rapidly growing national debt. As often happens, calls for cuts in government [...]
26Oct2011 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 4 comments | ContinuedQuantitative Easing Forever?
Despite assertions that it has ended its policy of quantitative easing (QE), the Fed is unlikely to be able to do so until it also ends its zero-interest-rate policy (ZIRP). This deadly policy duo has had terrible consequences for the American economy and every country using U.S. dollars. It is as though the Fed were [...]
26Oct2011 | Christopher Lingle | 1 comment | ContinuedProgressive Intolerance
Television pundits increasingly express an attitude that is at once arrogant and ignorant: The people who oppose Keynesian economics—specifically an increase in government deficit spending to create jobs and jumpstart the economy—are the same kind of people who also believe that the earth is only several thousand years old (rather than 4.5 billion), that evolution [...]
26Oct2011 | Sheldon Richman | 7 comments | ContinuedTalk About a Revolution
What caused the Industrial Revolution? Few questions in economic history are discussed and debated as much as this one. Even if you happen to be among the small number of people who regret what historian (and Freeman columnist) Steve Davies calls “the wealth explosion” of the past couple of centuries, you must nevertheless find this [...]
24Aug2011 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 5 comments | ContinuedHow an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes
Ignorance of economics is rampant. The average person believes the secret to prosperity is consumption and was often led to that fallacy by professional economists who should know better. Economic education in the universities has been as much a part of the problem as the solution, with millions of students taught Keynesian beliefs about government [...]
22Jun2011 | Robert Batemarco | 4 comments | ContinuedChina: Wealth but Not Freedom
When Chinese President Hu Jintao visited Washington earlier this year he received the gracious welcome and state dinner he did not get on his first visit in 2006. He also had some tough discussions on trade, foreign exchange, national security, and human rights. China can be proud of the rapid economic progress it has made [...]
21Apr2011 | James A. Dorn | 2 comments | ContinuedTariffs and Freedom
A historical episode that opponents of consumer sovereignty—that is, opponents of free trade—frequently cite to support their case for high tariffs is late nineteenth-century America. Pat Buchanan, for example, in his book The Great Betrayal asserts about the 1800s that “Behind a tariff wall . . . the United States had gone from an agrarian [...]
22Dec2010 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 19 comments | ContinuedWar Would End the Recession?
In his September 28 New York Times blog post, Paul Krugman announced that “economics is not a morality play.” That turn of phrase is his way of defending the idea that in unusual times, such as the sort of deep recession we are in, we can get strange relationships between economic cause and effect. The result [...]
22Dec2010 | Steven Horwitz | 41 comments | ContinuedIntellectual Property: Silly or Sinister?
Imagine a land recently seized from a foreign power where there is little law and a lot of gold. Since nature abhors a vacuum, prospectors quickly adopt the conventions of private property: Whoever is first to put four stakes in the ground is the proud owner of the land and any gold beneath. This would [...]
22Dec2010 | David K. Levine | 33 comments | ContinuedPaying the Unemployed Does Not Stimulate an Economy
Many in Congress as well as the President and some of his economic advisers have argued that extending the period for paying the unemployed will stimulate the U.S. economy out of its sluggish performance. Would any of them consider as valid an argument that giving money out of their own pockets to an unemployed member [...]
24Nov2010 | James C. W. Ahiakpor | 17 comments | ContinuedThe Power of Freedom
WARNING: After reading this column, many of you will want to send me emails condemning me for my apostasy or telling me why I am mistaken. I welcome your feedback as I beg your indulgence. So, here goes: I don’t believe that the welfare state, or the regulatory state, inevitably leads to widespread poverty or [...]
22Oct2010 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 29 comments | ContinuedConsumer Spending Drives the Economy?
Consumer spending makes up more than 70 percent of the economy, and it usually drives growth during economic recoveries.” —“Consumers Give Boost to Economy,” New York Times, May 1 Every quarter, when the government releases its latest GDP figures, we hear the familiar refrain: “What the consumer does is vital for economic growth.” “If the [...]
22Sep2010 | Mark Skousen | 26 comments | ContinuedWhy Do Futurists Get So Much Wrong?
The Austrian economist Ludwig Lachmann once walked into the colloquium room at New York University, where the blackboard displayed this quotation: “When it comes to the future, one word says it all: You never know. – Y. Berra.” Having built much of his economics on the unknowability of the future, Lachmann noticed the quote. However, [...]
25Aug2010 | Steven Horwitz | 6 comments | ContinuedUnderstanding the Process of Economic Change
In the late 1980s, as the Soviet empire began to collapse in central Europe, a burning policy issue emerged: how to transform socialist economies into functioning market-oriented societies. As this discussion developed, it was astounding to discover how little the economics profession was able to contribute. For example, at an annual meeting of the American [...]
8Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued-
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