All Posts Tagged With: "government intervention"
Destroying Value
In Cleveland and other American cities homes are being demolished because five years after the housing bust there is nothing better to do with them. Therein lies a lesson in Austrian business cycle theory. In a world of uncertainty, waste—the destruction of value—is inevitable. Human action, which aims to replace inferior circumstances with superior circumstances, [...]
4Jan2012 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedCrisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm’s book on the great subprime crisis gets off to a good start by dismissing as a red herring the “tired” argument attributing the boom to “greed” and focusing instead on “changes in the structure of incentives . . . that channeled greed in new and dangerous directions.” These included programs [...]
30Nov2011 | George A. Selgin | 2 comments | ContinuedDangerous Political Naifs
Being well past the age of 50 and having spent nearly all my adult life as an academic economist, I seize the privilege of doing what so many other economists of my age and rank do—namely, offer unsolicited speculations about what is right and what is wrong with modern economics. First, something that is right. [...]
26Oct2011 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 10 comments | ContinuedAlchemists of Loss: How Modern Finance and Government Intervention Crashed the Financial System
The subprime crisis and financial meltdown have spawned dozens of books, some aimed at re-enshrining John Maynard Keynes, others at laying him to rest once more; some aimed at praising the Federal Reserve for staving off another Great Depression, others at blaming it for treating the economy to another cyclical episode. In Kevin Dowd and [...]
26Oct2011 | Roger W. Garrison | 0 comments | ContinuedHenderson’s Iron Law of Government Intervention: The 1967 Detroit Riot
The more I have studied government policy over the last 40 or so years, the more strongly I have come to believe that whatever problem you name, some government intervention—a tax, a subsidy, a spending program, or a government regulation—was an important cause or, at a minimum, made the problem worse. The evidence for this [...]
26Oct2011 | David R. Henderson | 5 comments | ContinuedThe Infrastructure Delusion: Getting Nowhere Faster
Infrastructure does not an economy make. Highways and railroads, airports and seaports, communications towers and fiber-optic cables are essential for the flow of commerce, but it is the people, goods, and information moving over and through this infrastructure that are the heart of an economy. Overinvestment in roads, bridges, and airports means underinvestment in the [...]
26Oct2011 | Richard W. Fulmer | 12 comments | ContinuedBudget-Cutting Resistance
So here’s the problem: While polls show that people want the government’s budget deficit and the national debt reduced, they don’t want the biggest spending items cut. In the April 17 ABC News-Washington Post poll, 59 percent said that the deficit should be reduced through a combination of unspecified spending cuts and tax increases. But [...]
22Jun2011 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | ContinuedCan Government Manage the Economy?
A doctor says he can cure illness by waving birch wands over the patient. We are skeptical, but being open-minded we agree to give him a chance with ailing Uncle George. He waves a red wand and chants something. The patient shows no improvement. “Let me try a green one,” he says. We’re still tolerant. [...]
21Apr2011 | James L. Payne | 2 comments | ContinuedPoverty Is Easy to Explain
Academics, politicians, clerics, and others always seem perplexed by the question: Why is there poverty? Answers usually range from exploitation and greed to slavery, colonialism, and other forms of immoral behavior. Poverty is seen as something to be explained with complicated analysis, conspiracy doctrines, and incantations. This vision of poverty is part of the problem [...]
21Apr2011 | Walter E. Williams | 27 comments | ContinuedUnchecked and Unbalanced: How the Discrepancy Between Knowledge and Power Caused the Financial Crisis and Threatens Democracy
This slim yet insight-packed volume makes fair progress toward explaining the 2008 financial crisis. The first of the book’s three chapters outlines the “housing industrial policy” that led to the crisis. The second discusses the conflict between concentrated political power and effective use of socially dispersed knowledge, and the third suggests reforms. Tracing the government’s [...]
23Mar2011 | David M. Brown | 3 comments | ContinuedWhat Economic Freedom Indexes Leave Out
In a syndicated column last October, television journalist John Stossel lamented the downgrading from sixth to eighth place—“behind Canada!”—of the United States on the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom. The Index is based on several metrics, including freedom of movement of capital, the degree of business regulation, and levels of taxes and [...]
24Feb2011 | Kevin A. Carson | 6 comments | ContinuedCornfield Socialism
If a key part of a genuine market economy is the full force of profit and loss, then subsidizing ethanol is anti-market.
3Feb2011 | Steven Horwitz | 18 comments | ContinuedCan Government Manage the Economy?
For 98 years the federal government has been attempting to prevent asset bubbles, recessions, and spasms of unemployment.
1Feb2011 | James L. Payne | 10 comments | ContinuedGovernment and Conflict
Human differences such as race, ethnicity, religion, and language have always been sources of conflict. Despite arguments to minimize the importance of these differences, people still exhibit preferences in these areas when choosing a spouse, friend, business partner, employee, neighborhood, and other associations. People do not associate randomly. Efforts to deny such assortative behavior in [...]
22Dec2010 | Walter E. Williams | 4 comments | ContinuedRules, Regulation, and Mixed Martial Arts
The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) illustrates well the benefits of limiting rules and regulations, and provides an example of immense success despite—rather than because of—government intervention. The UFC, which hosts mixed martial arts (MMA) events, has grown immensely popular in recent years. In the early years, the mid-1990s, the sport had a limited number of [...]
24Nov2010 | and Thomas Snyder | 4 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 | ContinuedThe Distorting Effects of Transportation Subsidies
Although critics on the left are very astute in describing the evils of present-day society, they usually fail to understand either the root of those problems (government intervention) or their solution (the operation of a freed market). In Progressive commentary on energy, pollution, and so on—otherwise often quite insightful—calls for government intervention are quite common. [...]
22Oct2010 | Kevin A. Carson | 51 comments | Continued-
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