All Posts Tagged With: "intervention"

The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008

Reading The Return of Depression Economics, I have to admit I was surprised. Paul Krugman, 2008 Nobel Prize winner in economics and New York Times columnist, isn’t as feisty and partisan in the book as he is in his column. Moreover, he presents some useful information about the many economic collapses that have occurred in [...]

18Nov2009 | William L. Anderson | 0 comments | Continued

In the Grip of Madness

“Thank God we had the federal government last week to bail out the private sector!”  That is what a rather statist friend of mine declared a year ago as the economy tanked, almost gleeful that the financial crisis seemed to be proving how much we all need a massive federal establishment to both regulate and [...]

19Aug2009 | Lawrence W. Reed | 24 comments | Continued

Give Up? Are You Kidding?

We should not squander a second feeling bad for ourselves. This is a moment when our true character, the stuff we’re really made of, will show itself. If we retreat, that would tell me we were never really worthy of the battle in the first place. But if we resolve to let these tough times build character and rally our dispirited friends to new levels of dedication, we will look back on this occasion someday with pride at how we handled it.

17Jun2009 | Lawrence W. Reed | 7 comments | Continued

FDR’s Lucky Timing

It’s not clear how any of FDR’s 1933 policies could have accounted for a 17 percent increase in GDP, even if they promoted expansion, because they wouldn’t have had time to ripple through the economy. It seems more likely that FDR had the good fortune to come into office near the bottom of the Depression, and enough adjustments in wages, prices, and other factors had occurred that the economy was ready to recover.

10Jun2009 | Jim Powell | 5 comments | Continued

The Dynamics of Disintervention

1) government interventions into the market process tend systematically to generate unintended consequences; 2) many of these unintended consequences frustrate the announced goals of those who support the interventions; 3) the response to these frustrated intentions tends strongly in the direction of further intervention; 4) the economic system performs less effectively in coordinating the plans of buyers and sellers as it becomes burdened with the cumulative effects of an increasingly chaotic mix of interventions; and 5) the process comes to an end when these cumulative effects result in a major system-wide crisis and public choosers decide to reject interventionism in favor either of comprehensive planning or radically freer markets.

21May2009 | Sanford Ikeda | 0 comments | Continued

The Two-Price System: U.S. Rationing During World War II

As the United States mobilized for war after mid-1940, the government’s demands for munitions and related resources began to put pressure on certain markets, and soon prices began to rise. In 1941 they rose faster: from December 1940 to December 1941, the producer price index increased by 17 percent, the consumer price index by 10 [...]

24Apr2009 | Robert Higgs | 4 comments | Continued

Feeling Their Oats

How inspiring it was to see nearly two dozen representatives of the poorest nations’ governments walk out of September’s World Trade Organization meeting to protest the rich countries’ subsidies to farmers. I don’t say this lightly. Governments rarely inspire anything in me. But here was a group of governments that finally put diplomatic niceties aside [...]

1Dec2003 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Equality

Mr. Jebb is a British educator, editor, and journalist.
Editor’s Note: It is not our purpose to take sides in what might be deemed the political affairs of Great Britain. This critique of “Towards Equality,” a pamphlet recently released by the British Labor party, is presented primarily for those in this country who are increasingly [...]

21Nov2009 | Reginald Jebb | 0 comments | Continued

DespotismDemocratic Nations

In his foreword to the 1956 paperbacked edition of The Road to Serfdom (University of Chicago Press) Friedrich A. Hayek quotes briefly from Democracy in America, Part II, Book IV, Chapter VI, and suggests that the chapter be read “in order to realize with what acute insight De Tocqueville was able to foresee [in 1835] [...]

21Nov2009 | Alexis De Tocqueville | 0 comments | Continued

Book Review: A History of the Monroe Doctrine by Dexter Perkins and Americas Rise to World Power, 1898-1954 by Foster Rhea Dulles

Boston: Little, Brown and Co. 469 pp. $5.00.
(The New American Nation Series) New York: Harper and Brothers. 314 pp. $5.00.
The basic international and diplomatic policy of the United States—which kept us out of disastrous foreign wars and other expensive entanglements abroad for over a hundred years—is usually assumed to date from Washington’s Farewell [...]

21Nov2009 | Harry Elmer Barnes | 0 comments | Continued