All Posts Tagged With: "interventionism"
Hamilton’s Curse: How Jefferson’s Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution–and What It Means for Americans Today
The more historical research I read and the more I contrast what economists write with what non-economists write, the more I am convinced that the bulk of history and biography should be redone. Thomas DiLorenzo, an economics professor at Loyola College in Maryland, explains why: “Most historians are not educated in the field of economics, [...]
24Feb2010 | Art Carden | 3 comments | ContinuedUnmasking the Sacred Lies
Unmasking the Sacred Lies is an excellent introduction to the major economic policies of the United States. Author and Freeman contributor Paul A. Cleveland traces the history of those policies up to 2008, explains their effects, and explores their alignment with the nation’s founding principles. The book aims to “shed light on the underlying lies [...]
5Jan2010 | Joseph G. Lehman | 1 comment | ContinuedA Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression
Richard Posner’s latest book belongs to the fast-expanding cottage industry of financial crisis books. A federal judge with a grounding in economics, Posner would seem to be an ideal person to tackle this complicated subject. Alas, he provides neither fresh material nor an interesting perspective. Posner describes well-known events—the failure of investment banks Bear Stearns [...]
5Jan2010 | Chidem Kurdas | 1 comment | ContinuedThe 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 | 28 comments | 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 | 3 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 | 5 comments | Continued“The issue is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution” (Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos, p. 28).
I have to confess that I really do want to like the Sarkozy’s. I find President Sarkozy endlessly entertaining, though sometimes more for gaffes that would be simply unheard of in U.S. politics than for his policy (take, for instance, his recent insult sans apology episode). And Carla Bruni, though her past may not speak [...]
21Jan2009 | Margaret Morgan | 0 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 | 7 comments | ContinuedThe Free Market Is Failing?
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 | 6 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 | 6 comments | ContinuedThe Subprime Crisis Shows that Government Intervenes Too Little in Financial Markets?
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
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 system within which it is embedded.” Individual parts receive their character from the whole of which they are [...]
1Sep2008 | Kevin A. Carson | 8 comments | ContinuedInterpreting 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 [...]
1Jun2008 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | ContinuedPresidents 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 [...]
1Apr2008 | John Stossel | 0 comments | ContinuedThe 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. [...]
1Apr2008 | Joseph Packer | 2 comments | ContinuedHierarchy or the Market
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 like to expand that line of analysis now and apply some common free-market insights on knowledge and incentives [...]
1Apr2008 | Kevin A. Carson | 2 comments | Continued-
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