All Posts Tagged With: "infrastructure"
The 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 | ContinuedThe Infrastructure Delusion
Goods, people, and information will not flow freely across a nation, regardless of the quality and extent of its infrastructure, if taxes and regulations block their flow.
15Aug2011 | Richard W. Fulmer | 41 comments | ContinuedGridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It
Congestion is five times worse than in 1995. Why? What should we do about it? Those questions drive Randal O’Toole’s Gridlock. The main reason for the increase, the author writes, is that beginning in the 1960s, “Many people looked at the costs of the automobile without considering the benefits, and their solution was to get [...]
21Apr2011 | Gary M. Galles | 26 comments | ContinuedWill Infrastructure Repairs Cut Unemployment?
Whenever the economy is in recession, people claim we can “put America back to work by rebuilding the infrastructure.” So I am not surprised that President Obama has decided to continue the “infrastructure” mantra in his latest economic plan.
8Sep2010 | William L. Anderson | 4 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 | ContinuedGovernment as Consumer
Destutt de Tracy, like other liberal, free-market economists of early nineteenth-century France, saw the State essentially as a predator, a destroyer of value, and the source of class conflict.
12Mar2010 | Sheldon Richman | 13 comments | ContinuedWhy the Government Fails to Maintain Anything
As the mad scramble to pass President Obama’s stimulus bill reminded us, politicians love to start new government programs. They gain things they can brag about during their reelection campaigns. But there’s little to be gained by maintaining programs somebody else started. No surprise, then, that in budget battles, maintenance tends to be under-funded. Moreover, [...]
23Sep2009 | Jim Powell | 12 comments | ContinuedGovernment Fundamentalism
Many free-market economists like me are quite willing to admit that markets don’t work perfectly and to examine and accept government solutions if their advocates can show how governments can be motivated to actually carry them out. And yet we are called market fundamentalists. On the other hand, many people who call us that are unwilling to change any of their views about the efficacy of government intervention no matter how badly the intervention works. Who are the fundamentalists here?
21May2009 | David R. Henderson | 16 comments | ContinuedGovernment and the Infrastructure
In all the debate over “stimulating” the economy through infrastructure spending, has anyone wondered why it takes a recession to get politicians thinking about fixing up the roads and bridges? I have a hunch private owners would be keeping up with maintenance right along.
8Apr2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedEmpire Builders by Burton W. Folsom, Jr.
Rhodes & Easton • 1998 • 205 pages • $17.95 Continuing in the spirit of his earlier The Myth of the Robber Barons, historian Burton Folsom has written another engaging book about American entrepreneurs. Empire Builders is an excellent piece of research and writing, bringing to life a key period of American business history while [...]
1Mar1998 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | Continued-
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