All Posts Tagged With: "labor"
Unemployment: What’s To Be Done?
In Part 1 I outlined natural unemployment, government-caused unemployment, and the attempts to measure these. We saw how ambiguous and subjective some of the concepts of unemployment are and how the government, specifically the Federal Reserve, is charged with managing it. Now we turn to current conditions and what can be done about them. There [...]
30Nov2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 6 comments | ContinuedObama’s Economics Lesson
President Obama apparently thinks that until the latest recession, no business realized it might reduce its workforce by substituting machines and other high-tech devices.
17Jun2011 | Sheldon Richman | 19 comments | ContinuedWisconsin Labor Brouhaha
Would it really be so bad if state governments had trouble finding workers?
25Feb2011 | Sheldon Richman | 26 comments | ContinuedJefferson’s Economist
See update below. In 1817 the Frenchman Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836) published his Treatise on the Will and Its Effects. Thomas Jefferson was so enthusiastic about Tracy’s book that he had it translated, then edited and revised the translation himself. He renamed it A Treatise on Political Economy. Why was Jefferson so excited about the [...]
20May2010 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedMy New Hero
A superintendent voids a union contract, fires all the teachers, becomes my personal hero. Of course she can hire the good ones back, but it will be under a new contract.
25Feb2010 | Mike Van Winkle | 2 comments | ContinuedTGIF: Workers of the World Unite for a Free Market
People typically become libertarians because they favor individualism and abhor seeing themselves and others abused. Unfortunately, nonlibertarians don’t know this. They think libertarians are simply pro-business (and anti-labor). We can set the record straight by acknowledging that government-business collusion hurts working people. The rest of TGIF is here.
18Dec2009 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedThe American Land Question
Widespread landownership long supported a kind of liberal-republican independence. Perhaps we should reexamine the nexus and ask ourselves how, in Donald Davidson’s words, we “let the freehold pass,” and whether that was really for the best.
10Jun2009 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 6 comments | ContinuedWhat's Good For GM?
The New York Times asks: So how did the famous 1953 quotation from the former General Motors president Charles E. Wilson — that what was good for our country was good for G.M., and vice versa — become a dated notion to so many people? The answer? The carmakers, for example, fought hard in recent [...]
18Nov2008 | Mike Van Winkle | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Freedom to Move
The freedom of the individual to move toward greener pastures, wherever they may seem to be, has been a vital part of the freedom of commerce—the freedom of choice that has constituted the truly distinctive characteristic of “the American way.” In view of our long experience of near-perfect freedom to move about as each might [...]
1Nov2006 | Oscar W. Cooley | 0 comments | ContinuedDecency Requires a Minimum-Wage Law?
The libertarian cliché that “at least the Republicans are right on economic policies” suffered another setback on the August 11, 2003, Los Angeles Times op-ed page, where Republican Douglas MacKinnon argues that anyone who cares about the poor should be ashamed of the failure of the Senate to raise the minimum wage. His essay is [...]
1Mar2004 | Aeon J. Skoble | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Birth of a Capitalist
This article is reprinted from the September 1955 issue of Ideas on Liberty. When the new superintendent came to the orphanage where I was reared, he found that we kids were not allowed to earn or have any spending money. So one of the first things he did was to tell us that if we [...]
1Dec2003 | Dean Russell | 1 comment | ContinuedOf Human Hypocrisy
A scene in W. Somerset Maugham’s beautiful novel Of Human Bondage captures the hypocrisy and pretense of much of what passes today for enlightened thought. Philip Carey, the novel’s protagonist, invites a dying friend, Cronshaw, to spend his final days at his small apartment. Cronshaw is a penniless poet. Leonard Upjohn is a self-satisfied writer [...]
1Jun2003 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | ContinuedBusiness Scandals Show Inherent Worker-Management Conflict?
As predictable as late-summer crabgrass, statists have taken advantage of the recent business fiascoes to argue that capitalism is not good for workers. In the September 2 New York Times, Steven Greenhouse’s “Update on Capitalism: What Do You Mean ‘Us,’ Boss?” argues that workers are questioning whether they have a common interest with the managers [...]
1Dec2002 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedEscaping Modernity
Many writers have described the mishmash of emotions and ideas that motivate the “antiglobalization” protesters who have been so much in the news since the 1999 Seattle riots. To point out that many of these ideas are irreconcilably at odds with each other is now old hat. (What, for example, does it mean to be [...]
1Aug2002 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Economics of Infantilism
While this year’s Winter Games were still going on, the website of the National Organization for Women was complaining that with all the Olympic coverage, the press had neglected to notice the 400-person rally, dubbed the “March for Our Lives,” held simultaneously in Salt Lake City. Led by organizations from the Poor People’s Economic Human [...]
1Jun2002 | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | 1 comment | ContinuedCapitalism and Coercion
A century and more ago, when Marxism was in its ascendancy as a theory, its followers (as well as many others) naturally believed its dogma about workers being the helpless pawns of capitalists–forced to sell their labor at less than its true worth, with no real alternative. But now, despite Marxism’s collapse as both a [...]
1Feb2002 | Allan Levite | 1 comment | ContinuedWar
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French economist, free-trade activist, and member of the French legislature after the Revolution of 1848. This is a chapter from his treatise, Economic Harmonies, translated by W. Hayden Boyers, which along with his other works is available from FEE. Among all the circumstances that have some part in giving to [...]
1Jun2000 | Frederic Bastiat | 2 comments | Continued-
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