All Posts Tagged With: "legal plunder"

Elizabeth Warren’s Non Sequitur

Elizabeth Warren, who’s running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, made quite a splash on the Internet with remarks to supporters in which she said: There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved [...]

30Nov2011 | Sheldon Richman | 17 comments | Continued

Tariffs are Legal Plunder

Everybody has an issue he reacts to most intensely. [Frederic] Bastiat’s was tariffs. And his most barbed comments were directed against those who favored governmental protection of national industry from foreign competition. He thought this legal method of cheating consumers by keeping prices above the market was a perfect example of how governments plunder their [...]

7Jul2010 | Dean Russell | 1 comment | Continued

Are Profits Fit Only for Serfs and Slaves?

In their recent book, From Poverty to Prosperity, Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz relate that ancient Romans believed it honorable to gain wealth through battle and conquest, but dishonorable to profit by engaging in commerce. Such work was considered so demeaning that it was left to the children of freed slaves. Because of the associated [...]

29Jun2010 | Richard W. Fulmer | 6 comments | Continued

Unmasking 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 | Continued

Free 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 | Continued

FEE at 60: Self-Improvement and First Principles

March 7 marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) by the late Leonard
E. Read, with the assistance of a handful of businessmen, economists, and journalists who were all dedicated to the ideas of individual liberty and the free market. From its beginning FEE has been more than what nowadays is called a policy-oriented think tank. Its work is based on the understanding that right thinking on policy issues is impossible unless people have a clear appreciation of the principles of freedom, private property, free enterprise, the rule of law, and constitutionally limited government.

1Mar2006 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

Government, Fiscal Responsibility, and Free Banking

Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. This paper was delivered at a conference on “One Hundred Years of Dollarization, or a Century without a Central Bank: The Case of Panama,” sponsored by Fundación Libertad in Panama City, Panama, on November 12, 2004. There has been no greater threat to life, liberty, and property throughout [...]

1Feb2005 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

The Tobacco-Quota Buyout: More Legal Plunder

E. C. Pasour, Jr., is professor emeritus of agricultural and resource economics, North Carolina State University. Critics of tobacco use (and others) have been calling for an end to all government support to the industry for several decades. Now, under the corporate-tax bill passed by Congress last October, owners of tobacco quotas and farmers who [...]

1Feb2005 | E.C. Pasour Jr. | 2 comments | Continued

Moral Alchemy

The welfare state is a political-legal environment in which the government goes beyond protecting life, liberty, and property against physical aggression and fraud—the traditional classical-liberal functions—ostensibly to assure a broader conception of welfare, such as health, retirement security, employment security, education, consumer and worker safety, and so on. We should pay close attention to words. [...]

1Feb2005 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Don’t Expect Much From Politics

The older I get and the more I learn from observing politics, the more obvious it is that it’s no way to run a business—or almost anything else, for that matter. The deficiencies, absurdities, and perverse incentives inherent in the political process are powerful enough to frustrate anyone with the best of intentions. It frequently [...]

1Dec2001 | Lawrence W. Reed | 1 comment | Continued

Bastiat and Unionism

On November 17, 1849, Bastiat delivered a “Speech on the Suppression of Industrial Combinations” in the Legislative Assembly. He spoke in favor of repealing legislation that prevented workers from organizing unions and calling strikes. The speech startled both his traditional adversaries on the left (the socialists) and his occasional allies on the right (the conservatives).

1Nov2001 | Charles W. Baird | 1 comment | Continued

Harmony from Liberty

Contributing editor Norman Barry is professor of social and political theory at the University of Buckingham in the UK. He is the author of An Introduction to Modern Political Theory (St. Martin’s Press). As we celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frédéric Bastiat we are reminded once again of how much contemporary economic [...]

1Jun2001 | Norman Barry | 2 comments | Continued

Bastiat: Champion of Economic Liberty

Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. When this article first appeared, he was Ludwig von Mises Professor of Economics and chairman of the economics department at Hillsdale College in Michigan. The defense of economic liberty has never been an easy task. Adam Smith expressed his own despair at this problem in The Wealth of [...]

1Jun2001 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

Frederic Bastiat: The Primacy of Property

James Dorn is vice president for academic affairs at the Cato Institute and a professor of economics at Towson University in Maryland. This is adapted from a longer article that will appear in the September 2001 Journal des Économistes. Reprinted by permission. Frédéric Bastiat, although best known as an economic journalist, was also a pioneer [...]

1Jun2001 | James A. Dorn | 2 comments | Continued

Bastiat’s Birthday

Frederic Bastiat was born 199 years ago this month. If anyone can be described as the guiding spirit of the Foundation for Economic Education, it would be Bastiat. Thanks to the Foundation, his works, The Law, Economic Sophisms, Economic Harmonies, and Selected Essays on Political Economy, have been kept in print. They remain some of [...]

1Jun2000 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Out of Order by Max Boot

Basic Books • 1998 • 252 pages • $25.00 Max Boot is a journalist and editor at the Wall Street Journal who has made a name for himself (and a lot of enemies) with his articles exposing the despicable practices of plaintiffs’ lawyers who will do almost anything to squeeze money out of “deep pocket” [...]

1Mar1999 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | Continued

Leonard E. Read, Crusader

If you had known Leonard E. Read in the 1930s, you would probably not have picked him as a future crusader for the freedom philosophy. Charismatic, energetic, debonair, he was a businessman, an organization man, a Chamber of Commerce man. In 1932, in the depth of the Depression, he became manager of the Western Division [...]

1Sep1998 | Bettina Bien Greaves | 2 comments | Continued
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