All Posts Tagged With: "investment"
Taxing Investment
The income tax double-taxes saving relative to consumption, that is, reduces the returns to saving twice, while reducing the returns to consumption just once.
23Jan2012 | Roy Cordato | 13 comments | ContinuedRegime Uncertainty, Then and Now
In a 1997 article, “Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed After the War”, I advanced the idea of regime uncertainty in an attempt to improve our understanding of the Great Depression’s extraordinary duration and of the highly successful postwar transition to a genuinely prosperous market-oriented economy. The idea [...]
4Jan2012 | Robert Higgs | 4 comments | ContinuedThe Expanding Sphere of Opportunities
Human ingenuity will continue to come up with new products, and that same ingenuity will capitalize on the complementary investment opportunities those products create.
6Oct2011 | Steven Horwitz | 4 comments | ContinuedGrowing Government Ensures “National Greatness”?
There is widespread belief among politicians, public officials, and pundits that if government doesn’t give us the seeds, nothing will grow. A friend of mine served on our city’s legislative council for eight years. During that time he often heard—in defense of tax-funded business incentives—“If we don’t do something, nothing will happen.” The same belief [...]
21Sep2011 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 6 comments | ContinuedPrivate 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 | ContinuedEducation: Investment Versus Spending
Artificially lowering the price of education is bound to create surpluses of increasingly disappointed graduates in the years ahead.
14Dec2010 | Sandy Ikeda | 9 comments | ContinuedConsumer Spending Drives the Economy?
Consumer spending makes up more than 70 percent of the economy, and it usually drives growth during economic recoveries.” —“Consumers Give Boost to Economy,” New York Times, May 1 Every quarter, when the government releases its latest GDP figures, we hear the familiar refrain: “What the consumer does is vital for economic growth.” “If the [...]
22Sep2010 | Mark Skousen | 26 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 | ContinuedTGIF: Government 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. Read the rest of TGIF here.
12Mar2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedHow Dense Can They Get?
When it comes to power, energy density is the key. Solar power, wind power, and ethanol are so expensive because they are derived from very diffuse energy sources. It takes a lot of energy collectors such as solar cells, wind turbines, or corn stalks covering many square miles to produce the same amount of power [...]
5Jan2010 | Richard W. Fulmer | 12 comments | 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 | ContinuedSo Now Saving Is Bad
Keynes is back! Unfortunately. If you want to make sense of most of the reporting and commentary on the econony these days, you have to realize that most reporters and commentators and politicians are working from the Keynesian position that, as Paul Krugman puts it, “[I]ndividual virtue can be public vice… attempts by consumers to [...]
13Nov2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedFrom Kleenex to Zippers: The Unpredictable Results of Entrepreneurs
The 1920s was a decade that taught us many lessons
in economicsperhaps foremost among
them is that cutting tax rates encouraged entrepreneurs
to invest in a variety of revolutionary products,
from radios to refrigerators.
Life, Liberty, and Retirement Pensions
The right to acquire property is a staple of liberal political theory. But why would anyone bother accumulating property? If my monthly expenses are a thousand dollars, then what use could I possibly have for any monthly income larger than a thousand dollars? I could plausibly reason that if I work harder today, I might [...]
1Sep2005 | Aeon J. Skoble | 1 comment | ContinuedSaving Hunky Town
Arthur Foulkes is a freelance writer living in Indiana. It’s called “Hunky Town”—a small area of our city known for its large Hungarian population in the early 1900s. Now it’s just another poor neighborhood. “I sometimes forget parts of town like this exist,” my wife said as we watched the shabby homes, broken fences, and [...]
1Oct2003 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Return of the Keynesians
The Keynesians are back. After laying low in recent years, they are promoting their interventionist plans once again. Take Joseph Stiglitz, for example. He apparently waited until he gained the credibility of sharing the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2001 to become an unabashed cheerleader for Keynesian economics. Such a universally recognized accolade allowed him [...]
1Mar2003 | Christopher Lingle | 2 comments | ContinuedIronic Triangle
“No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” -Unidentified New York Surrogate Court judge, 1866 “President Bush has strongly hinted that he will sign any bill that emerges from Congress.” -New York Times, July 17, 2002 Did you hear the one about the congressional committee that grilled the businessman [...]
1Oct2002 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued-
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