All Posts Tagged With: "government spending"
Memo to Alan Greenspan: Keep Quiet
I’m getting tired of Alan Greenspan. First, the former Federal Reserve chairman blamed an allegedly unregulated free market for the housing and financial debacle. Now he favors repealing the Bush-era tax cuts. This has a certain sad irony. Recall that Greenspan once was an associate of Ayn Rand, the philosophical novelist who provided a moral [...]
22Oct2010 | John Stossel | 10 comments | ContinuedDeficit Hawks or War Hawks?
Last month I asked if the American people can afford a world-girdling foreign policy more befitting an empire than a republic. Look at it this way: War hawks make poor deficit hawks. Facing a $13 trillion national debt and trillion-dollar-plus annual budget deficits, we can’t afford to be complacent about foreign interventions costing $12 billion [...]
22Oct2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedPublic Works and Pyramids
High-cost government projects can be impressive and even have a wonder all their own, like Hoover Dam. However, if they use more wealth than they create, they are a burden, period.
13Oct2010 | William L. Anderson | 9 comments | ContinuedMilitary Keynesians Are the Worst Keynesians of All
From the National Journal this week: Two wars are not enough. America’s economic outlook is so grim, and political solutions are so utterly absent, that only another large-scale war might be enough to lift the nation out of chronic high unemployment and slow growth, two prominent economists, a conservative and a liberal, said today. Nobelist [...]
6Oct2010 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Evil of Government Debt
As we’ve seen in the last two issues, Destutt de Tracy, writing in early nineteenth-century France, had solid insights about the market process and government spending as a form of consumption not investment. In light of that, no one will be surprised that Tracy opposed government borrowing. In this day of trillion-dollar-plus federal deficits, his [...]
25Aug2010 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | ContinuedThe VAT: Not Just Another Tax
Recently there has been a great deal of speculation about how the U.S. government will deal with its massive budget deficits and increasing levels of debt. For readers of The Freeman the answer is rather simple: Since most of what the federal government does goes beyond its “legitimate” role, cut spending. Drastically. Discussions about balancing [...]
25Aug2010 | Roy Cordato | 3 comments | ContinuedThe Idea Room with Professor Steven Horwitz
Update: The transcript of this session has been posted here. Today FEE and The FreemanOnline.org hosted an hour-long Idea Room live chat with Professor Steven Horwitz. In a lively discussion about contemporary economic problems, Professor Horwitz answered questions on inflation, government spending, budget deficits, the gold standard, and many other subjects. Click here to visit [...]
21Jul2010 | Tsvetelin M. Tsonevski | 25 comments | ContinuedHow Did We Get Here?
The late Alabama governor George Wallace once said, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Republicans and Democrats.” Both Republicans and Democrats agree on taking our money. Where they differ is what to spend it on. A Democrat like Senator Edward Kennedy agrees to take our earnings and give them to cities and poor [...]
6Jul2010 | Walter E. Williams | 0 comments | ContinuedGovernment as Consumer
Destutt de Tracy, as I discussed in the June issue, was a French economist whom Thomas Jefferson did his utmost to bring to the attention of America. The first part of Tracy’s A Treatise on Political Economy (1817), the translation of which Jefferson arranged, is a primer in economics that will satisfy any aficionado of [...]
29Jun2010 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedForeign Lenders: Friends Indeed to a U.S. Treasury in Need
When the U.S. government wishes to spend more money than it receives as tax revenue, it covers the shortfall by borrowing, and foreign lenders have become increasingly important sources of such borrowed funds. Reliance on foreign lenders is as old as the republic. Indeed, loans from the French and the Dutch proved critical in keeping [...]
29Jun2010 | Robert Higgs | 2 comments | ContinuedGreece: The Canary in the U.S. Coal Mine?
With everything that was going on in the U.S. economy this past winter, the beginnings of the crisis facing the Greek economy were certainly easy to miss. As that crisis has now come to full flower, American observers overlook it at their peril: Greece’s problems, and those of other European countries, might well represent a [...]
29Jun2010 | Steven Horwitz | 15 comments | ContinuedNothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America
History buffs who focus on the world between the wars will find plenty to ponder in Adam Cohen’s Nothing to Fear. Openly critical books–from The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn (1948) to FDR’s Folly by Jim Powell (2003)–have laid bare the politics and economics of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, showing us how not to [...]
20Apr2010 | Roger W. Garrison | 3 comments | ContinuedCorruption in Government? Shocking!
It’s funny how the people who push hardest for government intervention in more and more areas are the first to gripe that everything has become politicized. What were they expecting? Did they forget that government is a political institution? Paul Krugman and Chris Matthews, among other Progressives, are apoplectic because two senators of the minority [...]
20Apr2010 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | ContinuedHow We’ll Know When We’ve Won
“Are we winning?” That’s a query I hear almost every time I speak to an audience about liberty and the battle of ideas. Everyone wants to know if we should be upbeat or distraught about the course of events, as if the verdict should determine whether or not we continue the fight. Too many friends [...]
19Apr2010 | Lawrence W. Reed | 1 comment | ContinuedGovernment: More Incompetent than Ever
Most intellectuals support big government, and millions of people depend on it. So why, with thousands of laws, millions of employees working to carry out those laws, and trillions of dollars spent, is it in trouble? The most popular big-government programs–like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid–are going broke. These entitlements account for more than half [...]
19Apr2010 | Jim Powell | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Census: Vehicle for Social Engineering
In his book Seeing Like a State, James Scott commented on the role played by census data in the rise of the modern State: “If we imagine a state that has no reliable means of enumerating and locating its population, gauging its wealth, and mapping its land, resources, and settlements, we are imagining a state [...]
19Apr2010 | Wendy McElroy | 1 comment | ContinuedBotswana: A Diamond in the Rough
Over the past 40 years Botswana has been sub-Saharan Africa’s fastest-growing country and one of the fastest-growing countries in the world. Though it started off as one of the poorest countries in the world, its per capita income now compares favorably with many Mediterranean counterparts. Like most countries, the financial crisis has slowed Botswana’s recent [...]
24Mar2010 | sbeaulier | 6 comments | Continued-
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