All Posts Tagged With: "poverty"
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism
What do the following have in common: hungry Venezuelans, starving North Koreans, ecological devastation in the former Soviet Union, and functionally illiterate students in Washington, D.C., high schools? Give up? They are all consequences of socialism. In his book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism, economics professor and National Review editor Kevin Williamson gives the [...]
4Jan2012 | George C. Leef | 4 comments | ContinuedGovernment 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 | ContinuedPopulation Control Nonsense
According to an American Dream article, “Al Gore, Agenda 21 and Population Control,” there are too many of us and it has a negative impact on the earth. Here’s what the United Nations Population Fund said in its annual State of the World Population Report for 2009, “Facing a Changing World: Women, Population and Climate”: [...]
30Nov2011 | Walter E. Williams | 10 comments | Continued“Find Out What the People Want”: The Russell Conwell Story
“There is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings. . . .” Those words come, interestingly enough, from what is almost certainly the most successful charitable fundraising speech ever delivered. It was given over 6,000 times, provided almost 1,700 young people with the opportunity to [...]
26Oct2011 | Harold B. Jones Jr. | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Cancer of Regulation
Politicians care about poor people. I know because they always say that. But then why do they make it so hard for the poor to escape poverty? Licensing, for example, prices poor people out of business. Take taxis: in New York City, you have to buy a license, or “medallion.” New York restricts the number [...]
24Aug2011 | John Stossel | 3 comments | ContinuedIndigenous African Free-Market Liberalism
Africa remains an enigmatic paradox: a continent rich in mineral resources yet so desperately poor. But the paradox is only superficial: Africa is poor because she is not free. Only 10 of the 54 African countries can be labeled economic success stories: Angola, Benin, Botswana, Ghana, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Uganda, and South Africa. This [...]
24Aug2011 | George B. N. Ayittey | 5 comments | ContinuedMust a Formal Legal System Come Before Prosperity?
Capital Letters It was disheartening to read John Stossel’s uncritical endorsement of Hernando de Soto’s diagnosis of the causes of poverty in Third World nations as their lack of street addresses and legal titles to property (“Why Do the Poor Stay Poor?,” March 2011). The error of these claims in De Soto’s The Mystery of [...]
25May2011 | Foundation for Economic Education | 0 comments | ContinuedRoots of Egypt’s Revolt
Egypt has been a pressure cooker for decades. Like others in the region, the Mubarak regime was sitting atop a simmering political crisis, simultaneously attempting to contain rising Islamist violence and snuff out pockets of political resistance. The country has been under a continuous state of emergency since the assassination of Mubarak’s predecessor, Anwar Sadat, [...]
21Apr2011 | Nouh El Harmouzi | 2 comments | ContinuedPoverty Is Easy to Explain
Academics, politicians, clerics, and others always seem perplexed by the question: Why is there poverty? Answers usually range from exploitation and greed to slavery, colonialism, and other forms of immoral behavior. Poverty is seen as something to be explained with complicated analysis, conspiracy doctrines, and incantations. This vision of poverty is part of the problem [...]
21Apr2011 | Walter E. Williams | 27 comments | ContinuedWhy Do the Poor Stay Poor?
Of the six billion people on earth, two billion try to survive on a few dollars a day. They don’t build businesses—or if they do, they don’t expand them. Unlike people in the United States, Europe, and Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, etc., they don’t lift themselves out of poverty. Why not? [...]
24Feb2011 | John Stossel | 9 comments | ContinuedA Libertarian Antipoverty Agenda
Too many poor Americans are stuck in poverty because of the structural barriers government puts in their way.
24Feb2011 | Steven Horwitz | 32 comments | ContinuedMaking Poor Nations Rich: Entrepreneurship and the Process of Economic Development
During the 2008 presidential campaign, a critic of then-candidate Barack Obama stated in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, “If he becomes president, I hope he hires some economists who understand why Great Britain, China, Hong Kong and South Korea all prospered when they let private industry rather than government allocate their country’s resources.” [...]
22Oct2010 | Robert Batemarco | 1 comment | ContinuedIn Defense of Payday Lenders and Their Customers
For poor people the payday loan option is better than going hungry between paychecks.
15Jul2010 | Steven Horwitz | 24 comments | ContinuedDéjà vu All Over Again
“[A]ll things recur eternally. . . .” ––Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra Sometimes I think Nietzsche was right. It happens when I read things like this from the New York Times last January: “An international team sponsored by the United Nations proposed a detailed, ambitious plan on Monday that it says could halve extreme poverty and [...]
8Jul2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty Not Affluence, Is the Environment’s Number One Enemy
The extraordinary thing about this excellent book is not its content as much as its source. Jack M. Hollander is a retired professor of energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley. Although he has had an impressive career in the field of energy (he has more than 100 publications to his credit), in [...]
6Jul2010 | Jane S. Shaw | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat’s Wrong with Reparations for Slavery
There has been much debate recently about reparations for slavery. According to its proponents, the federal government should award Americans of African descent financial damages solely because slavery, as an institution, existed in the United States from the founding until almost a century later. Three principal arguments are offered: (1) The legacy of slavery has [...]
30Jun2010 | Stefan Spath | 16 comments | ContinuedThe Rise of Government and the Decline of Morality
The recent financial crisis has expanded the power of government. Tea parties have revealed the disillusion of millions of Americans with the rise of government and the decline of morality. The crisis has damaged, unfairly, the vision of market liberalism. It is essential, therefore, to reexamine and articulate the principles of a free society and [...]
29Jun2010 | James A. Dorn | 10 comments | Continued-
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