All Posts Tagged With: "government planning"
What We Don’t Know about History Can Hurt Us
“It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so.” That famous line, attributed to many authors but apparently said by humorist Henry Wheeler Shaw (aka Josh Billings), applies to history as much as anything. What liberates oppressed people? I was taught [...]
26Oct2011 | John Stossel | 3 comments | ContinuedIntellectuals and Society
If you trace back to the origins of almost any damaging public-policy idea in America, you find it rooted in the imagination of some intellectual. Just to pick one field, consider housing. Why do we have huge tracts of depressing, unsafe, unclean public housing in some of our largest cities? That did not simply happen—the [...]
24Feb2011 | George C. Leef | 5 comments | ContinuedWho Watches Our Guardians?
Predictably, the leading inquisitors into the causes of the financial turmoil are themselves among the most culpable: Rep. Barney Frank, Sen. Chris Dodd, and New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. AIG got into trouble because it in effect wrote insurance policies (credit default swaps) against the failure of securities based on mortgages, many of which were waiting to blow up when the housing bubble burst. Who created the housing bubble?
21May2009 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedBook Reviews – June 2008
David’s Hammer: The Case for an Activist Judiciary by Clint Bolick Cato Institute • 2007 • 177 pages • $11.95 paperback Reviewed by George C. Leef In recent years “judicial activism” has been assailed from both ends of the political spectrum. Conservatives complain about “liberal” activism when courts strike down laws they favor, and “liberals” [...]
1Jun2008 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedAnother National Disaster in the Making: Government Reconstruction of New Orleans
Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans at the end of August. What followed was a further disaster in the form of government incompetence and confusion at the local, state, and
federal levels. Rarely have we seen a better instance of what Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises once rightly called “planned chaos.”
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 | Lawrence W. Reed | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Starship Private Enterprise
Timothy Sandefur is a law student at Chapman University in Orange, California. The television series Star Trek has inspired a whole generation of astronauts and space scientists. Its optimistic vision of humanity’s future in space has been credited with the wide popularity of what has become one of the most successfial entertainment franchises of all [...]
1May2000 | Timothy Sandefur | 2 comments | ContinuedProsperity Without Pollution
Mr. Semmens is an economist with Laissez-Faire Institute in Chandler, Arizona. I recently had the opportunity to participate in a World Future Society “debate” on whether we could reduce pollution without also reducing our economic well-being. Mainstream thinking asserts that we must sacrifice at least some of our prosperity in order to protect the environment. [...]
1Mar1996 | John Semmens | 2 comments | ContinuedA Free Market
Admiral Moreell is Chairman of the Board of Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation. What is meant by “the free market”? To answer this question we have to go back a step or two. Economics deals with desired goods in short supply. Air is not generally an economic good because there is enough for everyone and [...]
1Jun1956 | Ben Moreell | 0 comments | Continued-
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