All Posts Tagged With: "interventionism"

Private Investment and Public “Investment”

Politicians are fond of telling the public that we must “invest” in this program or that—be it education; health care; make-work infrastructure projects like the infamous “Bridge to Nowhere”; $50 million for an indoor rainforest in Iowa; $3.4 million for a tunnel to allow turtles to cross under a highway in Florida; $1.8 million for swine [...]

22Jun2011 | Adam B. Summers | 1 comment | Continued

Medical Consumers or Wards of the State?

Paul Krugman wants to know: “How did it become normal, or for that matter even acceptable, to refer to medical patients as ‘consumers’?” Let’s concede for argument’s sake there is something unattractive about viewing patients as consumers. Krugman writes, “Medical care, after all, is an area in which crucial decisions—life and death decisions—must be made. [...]

22Jun2011 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

The Economic Costs of the Civil War

Even after 150 years, the Civil War evokes memories of great men and great battles. Certainly that war was a milestone in U.S. history, and on the plus side it reunited the nation and freed the slaves. Few historians, however, describe the costs of the war. Not just the 620,000 individuals who died, or the [...]

23Mar2011 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 7 comments | Continued

A Boost for the Managed Economy

Nowhere is it easier to miss the forest for the trees than in discussions of government policy. Late last year the media were saturated with debates over the compromise tax package agreed to by Barack Obama and congressional Republicans. The package that passed the House and Senate included a two-year extension of the Bush-era tax-rate [...]

24Feb2011 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves

Books about the 2008 financial crisis keep coming, and New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin offers one of the better accounts of the meltdown. Using a large number of interviews, he reconstructs the words and acts of key people during the six months from the near-collapse of Bear Stearns in March to the bankruptcy [...]

24Feb2011 | Chidem Kurdas | 0 comments | Continued

Intellectuals 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 | Continued

Financial Regulation Snake Oil

Recent turmoil set off by the threat of Greek insolvency shows how fast markets change. Fear about the inability of European governments to pay their debts caused the 2010 turbulence. By contrast, the 2008–2009 havoc was rooted in the collapse of property values. The next crisis will be about something else, possibly another government’s debt. [...]

25Aug2010 | Chidem Kurdas | 1 comment | Continued

What Can Friends of Freedom Learn from the Socialists?

On March 14, 1883, a German philosopher living in exile in London passed away. When he was buried three days later in a modest grave where his wife had been laid to rest two years earlier, fewer than ten people were present, half of them family members. His closest friend spoke at the gravesite and [...]

1Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued

Stimulate the Catallaxy?

Last fall and winter’s brouhaha over the so-called economic stimulus package got me thinking about how far off target most people are when they talk about “the economy.” To hear the politicians and commentators tell it, the economy is a big machine located somewhere in Washington, D.C. That machine requires a skilled operator, and elections [...]

1Jul2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

Nuclear Energy Should Be Subsidized?

In a March 5 Los Angeles Times op-ed, “Jump-starting Nuclear Energy,” Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore, who now co-chairs the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, lauds the Obama administration for its decision to “guarantee loans for two advance-design nuclear plants in Georgia.” Nuclear energy diversifies our energy portfolio and doesn’t pollute the air the way fossil [...]

20May2010 | Art Carden and Mike Hammock | 9 comments | Continued

The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth

Benjamin Friedman is a professor of political economy and a former chairman of the economics department at Harvard University. He is also an unswerving advocate of the interventionist welfare state. His recent book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, is meant to demonstrate what is necessary to assure that the majority of the people will [...]

18May2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | Continued

Obama and the Public

Barack Obama says the people have a growing sense that “something is broken” in Washington. He attributes this to hyper-partisanship and a consequent lack of civility, and thinks public disillusionment can be reversed through better manners, bipartisanship, compromise, and cooperation. But to what end? Presumably greater government management of medical care, finance, education, and energy. [...]

20Apr2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | Continued

Corruption 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 | Continued

Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto

The election of Barack Obama in 2008 led to a gusher of books in 2009 by writers opposed to the new President’s philosophy and agenda. If you judge by sales figures, one of the most successful of those books was Liberty and Tyranny by Mark Levin, president of Landmark Legal Foundation and a nationally syndicated [...]

20Apr2010 | George C. Leef | 3 comments | Continued

A Contemptible Congress and a Derelict Court

What can Congress do that the Supreme Court would find unconstitutional? Or, what can Congress do that a president would veto as unconstitutional? It is not much exaggeration to say that Congress can do whatever it can muster a majority vote for, whether it is constitutional or not. The members only have to worry about [...]

24Feb2010 | Walter E. Williams | 5 comments | Continued

The Health Care Debate Was “Meaningful”?

Let’s give credit where credit is due. David Brooks does say one true thing in his New York Times column, “The Values Question”, on government health care reform: “The system after reform will look as it does today, only bigger and more expensive.” Brooks is certainly right that no “health care reform” proposal with any [...]

24Feb2010 | Charles Johnson | 1 comment | Continued

Theodore Roosevelt, Big-Government Man

Theodore Roosevelt has been known as “the Good Roosevelt,” “the Republican Roosevelt,” and “the conservative Roosevelt,” as distinguished from his fifth cousin Franklin, who’s credited with ushering in modern American big government. Yet promoters of big government have long recognized TR as one of their own. Biographer Frank Freidel wrote that “While at Groton [Franklin [...]

24Feb2010 | Jim Powell | 7 comments | Continued
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