All Posts Tagged With: "Milton Friedman"
Unemployment: What Is It?
Unemployment has regained center stage now that the debt crisis has receded from that position, at least for a time. Unless things change dramatically over the next year unemployment will be the number one issue in the forthcoming presidential election. Hardly any proposal will escape being labeled “job-killing” or “job-creating” or both. To begin with [...]
26Oct2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 2 comments | ContinuedMilton Friedman
Sunday is the 99th anniversary of the birth of Milton Friedman (1912-2006), one of the greatest champions of freedom and free markets in our time. Among FEE’s first publications was Friedman’s essay demolishing the case for rent control, written with another future Nobel Prize-winner, George Stigler. It was aptly named “Roofs or Ceilings? The Current [...]
29Jul2011 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | ContinuedGold and Money
Nothing seems to arouse passions—pro and con—quite like suggestions that gold should once again play a role in our money. “Only gold is money,” says one side. “It’s a barbarous relic,” says the other. Let’s turn down the heat a bit and look into some propositions about gold. That should lead us to some reasonable [...]
24Feb2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 23 comments | ContinuedMy Favorite Libertarian Books*
I am one of the many millions of beneficiaries of Andrew Carnegie’s public libraries. The one in the small town in which I grew up (Rahway, New Jersey) fed my early interest in books, providing a range of reading matter that was available in no other way, since there were few books at home. That [...]
28Jun2010 | Milton Friedman | 4 comments | ContinuedMurray Rothbard
In 1946 the fledgling Foundation for Economic Education published a pamphlet titled “Roofs or Ceilings: The Current Housing Problem,” a brief against rent control written by two unknown young economists: Milton Friedman and George Stigler. They would go on to win the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976 and 1982, respectively. That’s a remarkable story. [...]
24Mar2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedDeflation: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
During the current recession a number of commentators have made various comparisons to the Great Depression, mostly because of the dramatic decline in the stock market and ongoing troubles in the financial industry. When oil prices also began a dramatic decline in the autumn of 2008, pulling the overall consumer price level downward for the [...]
5Jan2010 | Steven Horwitz | 59 comments | ContinuedTransfer Machine
“The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul,” George Bernard Shaw once said. For a socialist Shaw demonstrated good sense with that quotation. Unfortunately, America has become a laboratory in which his hypothesis is being tested. The theory of government I was taught says that government provides [...]
1Jan2010 | John Stossel | 7 comments | ContinuedThe Depression You’ve Never Heard Of: 1920-1921
When it comes to diagnosing the causes of the Great Depression and prescribing cures for our present recession, the pundits and economists from the biggest schools typically argue about two different types of intervention. Big-government Keynesians, such as Paul Krugman, argue for massive fiscal stimulus—that is, huge budget deficits—to fill the gap in aggregate demand. [...]
18Nov2009 | Robert P. Murphy | 73 comments | ContinuedFinancial Crises and the Federal Reserve’s Punch Bowl
Why did the U.S. financial system nearly collapse last year? People blame Wall Street’s excessive greed and risk-taking. But without easy money, the massive risk-taking could not have happened. To be sure, financial firms leveraged up—that is, they did a lot of business with borrowed money. That juiced up revenues and bonuses in the boom—and [...]
18Nov2009 | Chidem Kurdas | 12 comments | ContinuedTransforming America: The Bush-Obama Stimulus Programs
George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s “stimulus” programs will permanently transform the American economy. The market-based system that has produced unprecedented prosperity relies on profit and loss, which rewards individuals and firms that add value to the economy and penalizes those that detract value. The various stimulus programs undermine that system. My discussion will focus [...]
19Aug2009 | Randall G. Holcombe | 13 comments | ContinuedRose Friedman, R.I.P.
Rose Friedman, wife of and collaborator with the late Milton Friedman, died today. This announcement of her death was posted at the website of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice: Rose Director Friedman passed away Tuesday, August 18, 2009, in her home in Davis, California, of heart failure. While the exact date of her birth [...]
18Aug2009 | Sheldon Richman | 4 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – December 2008
Is the Welfare State Justified? by Daniel Shapiro Cambridge University Press • 2007 • 309 pages • $80.00 hardcover; $27.99 paperback Reviewed by George C. Leef Americans have lived with the welfare state for so long—more than 70 years—that for most, it is simply a fact of life. Asking whether it is justified would seem [...]
1Dec2008 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedInflation 101: Cause Versus Transmission
Howard Baetjer, Jr. is a lecturer in economics at Towson University. It’s always a pleasure for a teacher to receive a note from a former student showing that he or she has taken key lessons to heart. I had such a pleasure last winter when Joey, who had taken Money and Banking with me last [...]
1Sep2008 | Howard Baetjer Jr. | 2 comments | ContinuedEquality, Markets, and Morality
Burton Folsom, Jr. is a professor of history at Hillsdale College and author of New Deal or Raw Deal?, to be published by Simon & Schuster this year. The subject of “equality” is the source of much political debate. Ever since the founding era, free-market thinkers have argued for equality of opportunity in the economic [...]
1Sep2008 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 5 comments | ContinuedCapital Letters
Thanks to Milton Friedman’s brilliance, charisma, and diplomacy he became an ardent spokesman for many free-market reforms in this country. And now Ivan Pongracic, Jr. (“The Great Depression According to Milton Friedman,” September 2007) gives him credit for accomplishing what seems miraculous—convincing Fed officials that the Fed itself was responsible for precipitating the crash and [...]
1Dec2007 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedWartime Origins of Modern Income-Tax Withholding
Wars have always been the most important occasions for the introduction of new forms of taxation. At the outset of a war the state suddenly needs greatly increased revenues to pay for personnel and matériel to prosecute the war. Although governments typically increase the rates of existing explicit taxes and raise the rate of the [...]
1Nov2007 | Robert Higgs | 3 comments | ContinuedCapital Letters
Were Missionaries Like Psychiatrists? To the Editor: People have misunderstood and maligned Christians for two millennia, but goodness, must Dr. Szasz compare us to coercive quacks? He writes in The Freeman’s July/August 2007 issue: “Consider this parallel between psychiatry and missionary Christianity. The heathen savage does not suffer from lack of insight into the divinity [...]
1Nov2007 | Thomas Szasz | 0 comments | Continued-
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