All Posts Tagged With: "poverty"
Presidents and Poverty
Conventional wisdom holds that fighting poverty
has only lately been a concern of American
presidents, and that before Franklin Roosevelt
it was hardly a concern at all. This stubborn error
persists.
Social Security and the Insurance Illusion
In 1937, shortly after Franklin Roosevelt threatened to destroy the independence of the Supreme Court by “packing” it with ideological cronies, the Court came to heel and handed down verdicts in three cases affirming that the Social Security Act was, unlike several structurally similar pieces of pre-intimidation New Deal legislation, in accord with the U.S. [...]
1Sep2005 | Will Wilkinson | 3 comments | Continued"If We Had No Social Security, Many People Would Go Hungry"
Compulsory Social Security has been the law of the land for almost three generations, and many citizens of the United States are now convinced that they couldn’t get along without it. To express doubts about the propriety of the program is to invite the question: “Would you let them starve?” Many Americans are old enough [...]
1Sep2005 | Paul L. Poirot | 2 comments | ContinuedNo Buts about Freedom
Back in the early 1970s, the late Leonard E. Read, founder and first president of FEE, wrote a short piece in The Freeman called Sinking in a Sea of Buts. He said it was not uncommon or someone to say to him,I agree with you in principle, but . . . The but invariably referred to some exception from the principle of freedom in the form of a desired government intervention. The problem, Read pointed out, is that when everyones exceptions to freedom are added up, well, freedom ends up being sunk by all the buts.
Infatuated with Politics
The most striking fact about modern-day “liberals” is their thoroughgoing infatuation with politics. In their worldview, almost every objective should be pursued through legislation, regulation, or legal action. It’s a reflex. What distinguishes liberals is not their objectives, which range from the laudable to the ridiculous, but their insistence that politics is the best or [...]
1Jul2005 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedFree Trade and the Climb Out of Poverty
Over the thousands of years of human history, poverty and early death have been the norm, with comfort and longevity the exceptions. The improvements in the human condition, at least on average, seen over the course of the twentieth century dwarf the improvements of the previous centuries combined. By virtually any measure one can imagine, [...]
1Mar2005 | Steven Horwitz | 1 comment | ContinuedAntiglobalists Are Scarce in Poor Countries
Whenever some international conference on world trade takes place, without fail the organized forces of antiglobalization appear outside the gates. They whine; they protest; they frequently riot and attack. If you ask them, they’ll tell you that what they do is justified because they represent the world’s poor. Rarely are the protesters themselves poor. They [...]
1Jun2004 | James Peron | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat’s Wrong with the Poverty Numbers
Last fall the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual report on poverty in the United States. The report indicated that the number of people below the official poverty line had risen from 32.9 million in 2001 to 34.6 million in 2002. Worse, the official poverty rate had risen from 11.7 percent in 2001 to 12.1 [...]
1Apr2004 | Robert P. Murphy | 1 comment | ContinuedOblivious to the Obvious
“Ironically, the birth of a child is registered as a reduction in national income per head, while the birth of a farm animal shows up as an improvement.” -Peter Bauer (1991) Each passing year makes me more and more aware of human beings’ astounding capacity for overlooking the obvious. I have in mind here not [...]
1Nov2003 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 1 comment | ContinuedMassive Foreign Aid Is the Solution to Africa’s Ills?
President Bush traveled to Africa in July. Those sympathetic to the President might say he went to show his charitable concern for the problems of Africa and his sincere care for the downtrodden of the world. But a less rose-tinted view might have shown an unprincipled but skillful political machine bolstering its image among centrist [...]
1Nov2003 | WILLIAM THOMAS | 0 comments | ContinuedSaving Hunky Town
Arthur Foulkes is a freelance writer living in Indiana. It’s called “Hunky Town”—a small area of our city known for its large Hungarian population in the early 1900s. Now it’s just another poor neighborhood. “I sometimes forget parts of town like this exist,” my wife said as we watched the shabby homes, broken fences, and [...]
1Oct2003 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 2 comments | ContinuedDoes Prosperity Depend on Education?
Christopher Lingle is professor of economics at Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala and global strategist for eConoLytics.com. New Delhi, India—It has become an article of faith that economic progress depends on having an educated citizenry. A corollary is often attached, requiring governments to provide resources to meet this end. However, like so many self-evident truths, [...]
1May2003 | Christopher Lingle | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics
As this is being written, the television talking heads are imploring us “not to walk away” from Afghanistan and to “invest” billions there instead. Before buying into that idea, everyone should read this book by a former World Bank economist whose forthrightness has evidently cost him his job. Early on, Easterly makes the following observation [...]
16Mar2003 | John T. Wenders | 0 comments | ContinuedSeeing the World Plain
Doug Bandow, a nationally syndicated columnist, is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the author and editor of several books. Washington, D.C., is filled with professions of good intentions by politicians and bureaucrats as they steadily strip away Americans’ liberty and money. The political class uses even the most serious social problem to [...]
1Feb2003 | Doug Bandow | 0 comments | ContinuedAre Meat Eaters Starving the Poor?
Jeremy Rifkin, America’s ever-present guilt-monger, says hundreds of millions of people are going hungry because the world’s grain crops are being fed to livestock instead of people. Rifkin, writing in the May 27 Los Angeles Times, says eating grain-fed meat is “a new form of human evil.” He blames wealthy consumers for “eating at the [...]
1Oct2002 | Dennis T. Avery | 0 comments | ContinuedSocialism in Retreat
Free-market economists have argued for decades that interventionist government policies inadvertently lead to negative long-term consequences that far outweigh the perceived benefits. This has resulted, of course, in cries from the political left that advocates of capitalism care nothing about the indigent, needy, or otherwise downtrodden. So it is with bittersweet satisfaction that one sees [...]
1Oct2002 | Scott McPherson | 3 comments | ContinuedHow’s the Third World Doing?
The Third World is in trouble. Standards of living are plummeting, while the West is getting richer. Nearly everyone seems to believe it. The left wants to believe it as a justification for global socialism. Racists want to believe it because it “proves” the superiority of the white race. The media think it’s a good [...]
1Sep2002 | James Peron | 0 comments | Continued-
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