All Posts Tagged With: "interventionism"
The Rise of Big Business and the Growth of Government
Most people learn about the relation between the rise of big business and the growth of government in the form of what amounts to a morality play. In the most widely disseminated version, presented in nearly every American history textbook, the emergence of big business (playing the role of the devil) is said to have [...]
19Aug2009 | Robert Higgs | 1 comment | ContinuedPredictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions
As the title suggests, Predictably Irrational is another offering on behavioral economics. The overriding theme is that people not only tend to behave irrationally, but they do so in systematic and predictable ways. Thus our lapses from rational behavior reinforce each other rather than cancelling out. The evidence for this comes largely from experiments which [...]
21May2009 | Dwight R. Lee | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Trouble with Keynes
Keynesian theory implies an inherent instability in market economies. Thus the theory cannot possibly explain how a healthy market economy functions—how the market process allows one kind of activity to be traded off against the other.
1Apr2009 | Roger W. Garrison | 2 comments | ContinuedEconomic Facts and Fallacies
You don’t have to read far to find the focus of Thomas Sowell’s latest book, Economic Facts and Fallacies. It begins by quoting John Adams—“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence”—then immediately argues for the [...]
22Jan2009 | Gary M. Galles | 2 comments | ContinuedNationalization of the Mortgage Market
Breaking down the mortgage market breakdown and how it’s all the government’s fault.
1Dec2008 | Robert P. Murphy | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Free Market Is Failing? It Just Aint So!
There is no doubt the U.S. economy has hit a rough patch over the last several months. As is often the case when economic problems make headlines, pundits rush to declare that capitalism is “in trouble,” or “is ailing” or even “has failed.” This reaction to economic bad news is as old as capitalism itself. [...]
1Dec2008 | Steven Horwitz | 5 comments | ContinuedWhy on Earth Do We Have a Student Loan Crisis?
Amid all our other crises, you may have missed the student loan crisis. It isn’t nearly so life-threatening as global warming, nor as financially alarming as the subprime-mortgage collapse, but it does have a lot of politicians clamoring that the country needs them to prevent serious harm. That’s because—for reasons I’ll get to soon—many of [...]
1Nov2008 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Subprime Crisis Shows that Government Intervenes Too Little in Financial Markets? It Just Aint So!
Start with two assumptions. No. 1: banking and financial markets are inherently unstable. No. 2: government intervention into banking and financial markets can only stabilize (never destabilize). You’ll find it easy to conclude that any period of market instability we experience, like the recent subprime-lending problem, is the market’s fault and that it could have [...]
1Oct2008 | Lawrence H. White | 0 comments | ContinuedFree Market Reforms and the Reduction of Statism
Kevin Carson is the author of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. He blogs at Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism.
Objectivist scholar Chris Sciabarra, in his brilliant book Total Freedom, called for a “dialectical libertarianism.” By dialectical analysis, Sciabarra means to “grasp the nature of a part by viewing it systemically—that is, as an extension of the [...]
Interpreting the State of the World
Why are optimists about the state of the world disproportionately represented by classical liberals, libertarians, and free- market conservatives, while pessimists about the state of the world are disproportionately represented by statists?
Why do left-leaning media such as the New York Times and CNN devote so much ink and airtime alleging that middle-class Americans have made little [...]
Presidents Can’t Manage the Economy
The presidential candidates have been repeatedly asked how they would “manage the economy.” With the exception of Ron Paul, every candidate has accepted the premise that this is something the president of the United States should do. Or can do.
Nonsense.
Democrats act like the president is national economic manager. Republicans pay lip service to free markets, [...]
The Free Market’s Invisibility Problem
Joseph Packer is a Ph.D. student at the University of Pittsburgh School of Communication.
Advocates of liberty face an invisibility problem, first identified by nineteenth-century French libertarian Frédéric Bastiat in the appropriately titled essay “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” Through a simple story, Bastiat exposed the fallacy that later underlay Keynesian economics.
A young [...]
Hierarchy or the Market
Kevin Carson is the author of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. He blogs at Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism.
In an article in last June’s Freeman, I applied some ideas from the socialist-calculation debate to the private corporation and examined the extent to which it is an island of calculational chaos in the market economy. I’d [...]
The Free Market versus the Interventionist State
During the first half of 1926, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises visited the United States on a three-month lecture tour. After his return to his native Austria, he delivered a talk on “Changes in American Economic Policy” at a meeting of the Vienna Industrial Club. He explained:
The United States has become great and rich under [...]
From the President: The American Spirit of Enterprise
America has been the land of opportunity and free enterprise, an example and a hope for tens of millions of people around the world. In America both the industrious worker and the creative entrepreneur have been hailed as the complementary producers of prosperity and rising standards of living.
Class and caste were meant to play no [...]
Downsizing the Federal Government
By Chris Edwards Reviewed by J. H. Huebert
1May2007 | J.H. Huebert | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Cost of the Federal Government in a Freer America
Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE.
In February, President George W. Bush submitted his proposed federal budget for the fiscal year that begins in October. It called for total government spending of over $2.9 trillion. The administration and the Republicans in Congress insisted that this budget reflected fiscal responsibility and the promise of a return [...]
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
