All Posts Tagged With: "paternalism"
New Threats to Freedom: From Banning Ice Cream Trucks in Brooklyn to Abandoning Democracy Around the World
New Threats to Freedom, edited and introduced by HarperCollins’s executive editor Adam Bellow, is an ambitious anthology. Its premise: The twentieth century faced unique threats to freedom, such as communism and fascism, and the 21st century equally confronts unique challenges to the preservation of freedom. Thirty renowned authors examine 30 of those “threats,” which include [...]
4Jan2012 | Wendy McElroy | 3 comments | ContinuedDrug Decriminalization Has Failed?
Michael Gerson, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and now a columnist for the Washington Post, has denounced libertarianism as “morally empty,” “anti-government,” “a scandal,” “an idealism that strangles mercy,” guilty of “selfishness,” “rigid ideology,” and “rigorous ideological coldness.” (He’s starting to repeat himself.) In his May 9 column, “Ron Paul’s Land of Second-Rate [...]
24Aug2011 | David Boaz | 7 comments | ContinuedCapital Letters
Where Is the Dollar Defined? To the Editor: I was belatedly reading in the November 2003 issue of Ideas on Liberty when I came across something that caught my eye. This was the statement in George Leef’s book review of Pieces of Eight by Edwin Vieira, Jr., claiming that the Constitution defined a dollar as [...]
6Jul2010 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedWhy Not More Liberty?
There are two extreme views of American government and the political process. One is that policy is the result of special interests rigging the system in their favor and exploiting the ignorant or at least impotent masses. The other is that government pretty much gives the people what they want. My own view is much [...]
5Jul2010 | Russell Roberts | 0 comments | Continued“What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear”
I took that title from volume 2, section 4, chapter 6 of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1840). Considering what has been happening legislatively (and not just in the last year-plus), it seems like a good time to revisit Tocqueville’s writing about democratic despotism. He notes that despotism in a constitutional republic would be [...]
20May2010 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Myth of Unregulated Tobacco
On June 22, President Obama signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act (FSPTCA), a law that gives the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulatory authority over tobacco products. The law requires the FDA to develop a new tobacco-regulation center with all related costs to be covered by fees paid by the industry. [...]
19Aug2009 | Bruce Yandle | 0 comments | ContinuedRaw Milk and the Sour State
Whether it is an expensive organic brand or simply carries a mega-chain store name, that milk has undergone pasteurization and homogenization. There is a growing subset of consumers who would prefer not to buy their milk this way. They want it unpasteurized, unhomogenized—in a word, “raw.”
20Jan2009 | William E. Pike | 13 comments | ContinuedGovernmental Logic
Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, had this to say in connection with the auto bailout: We will not let the taxpayers spend their hard-earned money on ailing carmakers unless these companies are forced to reform their bad habits — either inside or outside bankruptcy. So the way McConnell sees it, we taxpayers want to [...]
11Dec2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedPaternalist Nudges
Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein and University of Chicago economics professor Richard Thaler are self-proclaimed “libertarian paternalists” (http://tinyurl.com/6xy6l4). Contradiction in terms? They think not. According to their approach, “[G]overnments try to move people in good directions without imposing penalties, mandates or bans.” The part about “moving people in good directions” is the paternalism. The part [...]
1Nov2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedMarching to Bismarck’s Drummer: The Origins of the Modern Welfare State
Soviet socialism may now be a thing of the past, but there is one form of statism that still dominates the world, including the United States: the modern welfare state. Its tentacles of paternalistic control reach into every corner of personal and social life. It has made all of us “children of the state,” and [...]
1Dec2007 | Richard M. Ebeling | 5 comments | ContinuedNeed and Public Policy: Handle with Care
In public-policy debates the word most commonly invoked as the ace in the hole is “need.” However, “need” needs careful handling. “Need” has the political advantage, but the logical disadvantage, of lacking a clear meaning. That allows it to be systematically abused to distort understanding and to reach desired conclusions that justify picking people’s pockets [...]
1Nov2007 | Gary M. Galles | 0 comments | ContinuedLee’s Legion of Lessons
The state is a harsh taskmaster with a taste for eating its own. A man may devote much of his life to its violence only to find himself on the receiving end one day. The Bible warns that “all those who take up the sword perish by the sword.” Yet distressing numbers of folks try [...]
1Sep2007 | Becky Akers | 1 comment | ContinuedLibertarian Paternalism?
Can paternalism and libertarianism be squared with each other? Two prominent scholars think so. University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein and University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler make a case for what they call “libertarian paternalism.” Here’s their argument. A large body of experimental data, gathered mostly by behavioral psychologists and behavioral economists, shows [...]
1Sep2006 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | ContinuedWhy Not More Liberty?
Russell Roberts holds the Smith Chair at the Mercatus Center and is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His latest book is The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance. There are two extreme views of American government and the political process. One is that [...]
1Dec2004 | Russell Roberts | 0 comments | ContinuedTwisting Economics Against Immigrants
P. Gardner Goldsmith is an independent journalist and screenwriter in New Hampshire. On January 7 President Bush announced what appeared to be a sweeping plan to grant de-facto amnesty to millions of illegal aliens working in the United States. In fact, it was little more than a long-term worker-visa program that barely increased the ability [...]
1Sep2004 | P. Gardner Goldsmith | 0 comments | ContinuedThe WHO Global Treaty on Tobacco: A Smokescreen for More Government Control
On May 10 the U.S. government signed the World Health Organization’s (WHO) global treaty on tobacco control. While the treaty still has to be ratified by the Senate before it becomes the law of the land, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson declared at the signing: “President Bush and I look forward to [...]
1Jul2004 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | ContinuedNock Revisited
Some books and essays require regular re-reading. In the course of our busy lives, we can allow their subtle wisdom to fade into the landscape and lose their initial effect. A work of this kind is easy to spot: it is fresh and sparkling on every subsequent reading; each encounter with it feels like the [...]
1Jun2004 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued-
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