All Posts Tagged With: "free market"
TGIF: What Next?
Liberty always walks uphill. Read the rest here.
1Jan2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Next?
Before we can work to change things, we must know what we are trying to change. Have a happy, healthy, productive New Year. We have work to do.
1Jan2010 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Health Care Debate Has Been “Meaningful”? It Just Ain’t So!
There is a clash of fundamental values in the health care debate, but it’s not within conventional electoral politics. The real debate is between politics as a means of providing health care and a freer, more humane alternative: consensual social organization.” Read the rest of Charles Johnson’s article at TheFreedomOnline.org.
22Dec2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Health Care Debate Has Been “Meaningful”? It Just Ain’t So!
Credit where credit is due: David Brooks does say one true thing in his New York Times column “The Values Question” (Nov. 24) on government health care reform: “The system after reform will look as it does today, only bigger and more expensive.” Brooks is certainly right that no “health care reform” proposal with any [...]
22Dec2009 | Charles Johnson | 22 comments | ContinuedTGIF: Workers of the World Unite for a Free Market
People typically become libertarians because they favor individualism and abhor seeing themselves and others abused. Unfortunately, nonlibertarians don’t know this. They think libertarians are simply pro-business (and anti-labor). We can set the record straight by acknowledging that government-business collusion hurts working people. The rest of TGIF is here.
18Dec2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedTGIF: Perverse Health Care Incentives
The common impulse for “health care reform” is entirely honorable. It is distressing to know that so many people are vulnerable to bankruptcy-threatening medical bills or to raw deals from State-cartelized insurance companies. Who wouldn’t change that if he could? The question is: Which approach has a better chance of changing it? Centralized bureaucratic decision-making [...]
11Dec2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedPerverse Health Care Incentives
Ronald Brownstein of The Atlantic is the only mainstream reporter I am aware of who glimpses what the debate over health care economics should be about. Last month he wrote, “To save costs, Democrats mostly want to change the incentives for providers. Republicans mostly want to change the incentives for patients by shifting toward a [...]
11Dec2009 | Sheldon Richman | 9 comments | ContinuedTGIF: Snow Job Summit
What are the odds that yesterday’s White House jobs summit will lead to the creation of any real jobs? The summit was based on the magic theory of government: Say the right incantations and reality will be reshaped according to one’s desires. There are no economic laws. There is only will. If we all think [...]
4Dec2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedCompetition
Give Me a Break! Competition by John Stossel John Stossel is the hosts of Stossel on Fox Business and the author of Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel—Why Everything You Know is Wrong. Copyright 2009 by JFS Productions, Inc. Distributed by Creators Syndicate, Inc. “Choice, competition, reducing costs—those are the things that [...]
23Oct2009 | John Stossel | 1 comment | ContinuedTGIF: Being for the Free Market Isn't Enough
Harold Meyerson, an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post, this week launched a devastating attack on what he calls “mainstream economists.” Too bad he’s oblivious of Austrian economics. The rest of TGIF is here.
2Oct2009 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedFree-Marketeers Should Welcome Regulation?
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Paul Singer, chairman of the Manhattan Institute, suggests that “there is an urgent need for a new global regulatory initiative” to address the causes of the worldwide financial collapse and that even those who appreciate the qualities of free markets should welcome the new and different regulations he proposes [...]
23Sep2009 | Peter Lewin | 5 comments | ContinuedHealth Care: A Future Free-Market Alternative
I visit a new doctor because of complaints I’ve been having. The primary-care doctor begins his first visit with me by explaining his payment system. I need to put down a retainer based on his assessment of the time it will take him to deal with my problem, which he’ll inform me of at the [...]
23Sep2009 | Ross Levatter | 8 comments | ContinuedTGIF: Obama's Health-Insurance Cartel
President Obama and other advocates of nationalized health insurance have tried a variety of sales pitches, which indicates their difficulty in getting traction with the public. The latest is”competition and choice.” Who could be against those things? Barack Obama for one. The rest of TGIF is here.
21Aug2009 | 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 | ContinuedHuman Action: The 60th Anniversary
We are celebrating the 60th anniversary of a great book, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, by a learned man and a clear thinker: the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. It presents Mises’s understanding–after long years of study and thought–of how the market economy functions. It is a major contribution to human knowledge. Interventionist ideas [...]
19Aug2009 | Bettina Bien Greaves | 2 comments | ContinuedMarkets Don't Ration!
If I can’t buy a Lexus for $1,000, it’s not because the market rations the car to someone else. It’s because no one will sell it to me at that price when he can sell it to another person for more. Markets don’t ration!
17Aug2009 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Overlooked Solution for Health Care
Discussing healthcare reform with an advocate of government control is frustrating. It almost feels as if one is speaking a foreign language — and in a sense, the free-market proponent is speaking a foreign language. The meaning usually doesn’t get through. This is most obvious when the advocate of a State solution says, as President [...]
14Aug2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued-
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