All Posts Tagged With: "perverse incentives"
Government Is No Friend of the Poor
You’ve heard it all too many times to count, I suspect. Apologists for big government—the New York Times’s Paul Krugman and Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson being good recent examples—are convinced there’s just no good alternative to government social services. Without the government, people will go hungry. They’ll die in the streets. We’ll lapse back into [...]
4Jan2012 | Gary Chartier | 22 comments | ContinuedMaking Whistle-Blowing Pay
The federal bureaucracies are hard at work churning out rules to implement the Dodd-Frank financial “reform” act. In May the Securities and Exchange Commission announced rules for its new whistleblower program, which rewards individuals who provide the agency with “high-quality tips that lead to successful enforcement acts.” The minimum amount of recovered funds that can [...]
21Sep2011 | Warren C. Gibson | 2 comments | ContinuedComing Soon: The Federal Department of Standardized Minds
The story of federal intervention in education is one of abject failure. Coming in large supply only since President Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society,” Washington’s educational undertakings first resulted in billions of misspent dollars, then billions of misspent dollars coupled with increasingly rigid “accountability” rules. The result of both phases has been squandered funds and academic [...]
22Jun2011 | Neal McCluskey | 6 comments | ContinuedPublic Schools through the Public Choice Lens
Regarding the state of government (“public”) schooling in the United States today, two facts stand out. The first is that the average amount of money spent per pupil has dramatically increased during the past 35 years and is now one of the highest in the world, and the second is that student achievement, by both [...]
22Sep2010 | Michael Bors | 7 comments | ContinuedAre Welfare State Orphans in Good Hands?
On February 22, 2010, a court in suburban Washington, D.C., passed judgment in one of the most horrendous cases of child abuse in modern times. Renee Bowman, the adopting parent of three girls, had for years starved, neglected, and beaten them, while keeping them locked night and day in their bedroom. She choked two of the [...]
20May2010 | James L. Payne | 4 comments | ContinuedCan We Afford to Avoid the Truth?
The Times is urging us in the name of “cost reduction” to accept a huge new government expense that will affect us all in ways we cannot imagine because the regime in power declares that it will cut costs. It must be so because, well, it must be so.
16Dec2009 | William L. Anderson | 4 comments | ContinuedWhat Happened to Market Discipline?
During the late presidential campaign Barack Obama said, “[Today’s economic problems are] a stark reminder of the failures of . . . an economic philosophy that sees any regulation at all as unwise and unnecessary.” What? Does that mean that until last fall the Bush administration embraced the free market? Nonsense. Governments at all levels [...]
20Jan2009 | John Stossel | 3 comments | ContinuedGovernment Workers Are America’s New Elite
As a child, I would ask my mother on Mother’s Day or Father’s Day: “Why isn’t there a Children’s Day?” After she stopped laughing, Mom explained: “Every day is Children’s Day.” I didn’t understand the joke then, but now that I’m the father of three children, her answer makes perfect sense. I recalled that exchange [...]
1Jul2008 | Steven Greenhut | 22 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 | ContinuedUncle Sam’s Flood Machine
When NASAs Pathfinder spacecraft landed on Mars in 1997 and sent back pictures showing that the planet was once flooded, comic Alan Ray quipped: “Of course, Mars lacks the one factor that makes high waters on Earth so much more devastating. Mars has no FEMA.”
1Jan2006 | James Bovard | 5 comments | ContinuedPrivatizing Airline Safety and Security
The events of 9/11 underscore the importance of improving the safety and security of air travel. The government’s response to the terrorist attacks employs a command-and-control approach. That approach ought to be questioned. After all, it was the Federal Aviation Administration’s system that failed on 9/11. Why should we expect additional controls to be more [...]
1Nov2002 | and Paul A. Cleveland | 3 comments | ContinuedRace, Inequality, and the Market
Not long ago I found myself in a debate with colleagues about the economic status of black Americans vis-à-vis whites. Naturally, their presumption was against the free market. The logic, such as it was, ran as follows: (1) we live under a market system (more or less); (2) in a variety of areas blacks have [...]
1Oct2002 | Thomas E. Woods Jr. | 0 comments | ContinuedTrust No One Including The X-Files?
I have two favorite moments from The X-Files. In one of the television episodes (“Arcadia,” which aired in 1999), FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) go undercover in a planned residential community. Posing as the Petries—that’s right, same names as Rob and Laura from the old Dick Van Dyke Show—they [...]
1Jun2002 | Raymond J. Keating | 0 comments | ContinuedQuartering Species
Most Americans seldom think about the Third Amendment. Relegated by most scholars and courts to footnotes and history books, the Third Amendment states, “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.” [...]
1Oct2000 | and Andrew P. Morriss | 3 comments | ContinuedThe Professionalization of Parenthood
Susan Orr is director of the Reason Public Policy Institute’s Center for Social Policy in Washington, D.C. What do the following things have in common? The child-care initiative, foster care, Head Start, and the child-abuse prevention effort “Healthy Families.” All are programs for children and all receive government funding, most at the federal level. They [...]
1Jun1999 | Susan Orr | 0 comments | ContinuedWho Pays the Price for Motherhood?
Ross Levatter, M.D., is a physician who writes often on economics and political issues; Rebecca Geshelin is a financial director with an applied economics background. The authors thank David Dorn for providing details of the appropriate federal laws and regulations. Congress, with President Clinton’s approval, recently mandated that health maintenance organizations (HMOs) permit women giving [...]
1Jan1998 | and Ross Levatter | 0 comments | ContinuedConsumer Information and the Calculation Debate
Dr. Pasour is professor of agricultural and resource economics at North Carolina State University, Raleigh. Government intervention has been common throughout the world over the past half century, whatever the type of political and economic system. In socialist countries such as the former Soviet Union and its satellites, government assumed primary responsibility for all economic [...]
1Dec1996 | E.C. Pasour Jr. | 0 comments | Continued-
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