All Posts Tagged With: "private charity"
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 | 23 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 | ContinuedWhat’s Wrong with Government Funding of the Arts
People who oppose Soviet-style collective farms, government subsidies to agriculture, or public ownership of grocery stores because they want the provision of food to be a private matter in the marketplace are generally not dismissed as uncivilized or uncaring. Hardly anyone would claim that one who holds such views is opposed to breakfast, lunch, and [...]
24Aug2011 | Lawrence W. Reed | 7 comments | ContinuedLibertarian Paternalism: A Test
Behavioral economics is a growing subfield of economics based on the finding that people are not as rational as economic models have traditionally assumed. Numerous experiments have shown that people’s choices are systematically altered in response to changes in how those choices are framed, even though the framing is irrelevant to the consequences of those [...]
1Jul2007 | Dwight R. Lee | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Four Mistakes of Nonlibertarians
George Leef is book review editor of The Freeman. In Libertarianism: For and Against (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), two philosophers debate the merits of libertarianism. Arguing in favor is Professor Tibor Machan, a contributing editor to The Freeman. His opponent is Professor Craig Duncan, who attempts a refutation of libertarianism and seeks to persuade readers [...]
1Jun2007 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Shortcomings of Government Charity
Jude Blanchette is a freelance writer living in China. In their book, Myths of Rich and Poor, W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm observe, “Some part of human nature connects with the apocalyptic. Time and again, the pessimists among us have envisioned the world going straight to hell.” To be sure, “pessimists” apparently run most [...]
1May2007 | Jude Blanchette | 4 comments | ContinuedWas Dickens Really a Socialist?
I have been an avid fan of Charles Dickens’s works since before entering high school. I have also adhered to the freedom philosophy for about as long. Therefore, as the years passed and I read more and more commentators lauding Dickens as a catalyst for collectivist economics and state-centered social programs, I grew discouraged and [...]
1Dec2006 | William E. Pike | 8 comments | ContinuedHurricane Katrina Shows that Government Is Too Small?
By now everyone is aware of the almost inconceivable
incompetence of the Federal Emergency Management Agencys (FEMA) response to Hurricane Katrina.Those who cherish liberty might think this episode would bolster their cause.However, as usual the states intellectual bodyguards have attempted to use this disaster to justify ever higher budgets and even more dictatorial powers.
Mitigating Disaster: Abolish FEMA and Let Gas Prices Rise
The waste, delays, and incompetence that characterize FEMA are the result of a free-rider problem inherent in all federal spending programs.
1Dec2005 | Dwight R. Lee | 0 comments | ContinuedWal-Mart Is Good for the Economy
Ideologues who rant against Wal-Mart do not understand economics. In a market economy, success goes to those businesses that best and most efficiently serve consumer needs.
1Oct2005 | John Semmens | 1 comment | 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.
Government Should Regulate Charities?
Forbes magazine editor and columnist William Baldwin is upset that nonprofit charitable corporations are able to evade accountability, pay their executives too much, and engage in shady bookkeeping. He wants something done about it: “This country’s several million nonprofits escape with only the sketchiest of oversight by the Internal Revenue Service. Revenue agents figure they [...]
1Dec2004 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews
Rethinking the Great Depression: A New View of Its Causes and Consequences by Gene Smiley Ivan R. Dee • 2002 • 169 pages • $24.95 Reviewed by George C. Leef Recently, I found myself in an e-mail argument with a friend who is intelligent and well-educated—but not in economics. I had made the point that the best macroeconomic policy is one [...]
1Sep2003 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | ContinuedWhy Grover Cleveland Vetoed the Texas Seed Bill
Grover Cleveland was the last U.S. president with a valid claim to be known as a classical liberal. (By the time “Silent Cal” Coolidge became president, the big-government horse was already out of the barn, and Ronald Reagan as president was as much the big-government problem as he was the solution.) A lawyer who lacked [...]
1Jul2003 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedSay It Isn’t So, Jerry Lewis
It was a disappointing day for me, that day last year when comedian Jerry Lewis testified before a Senate subcommittee seeking taxpayer funding for muscular dystrophy research. It drove home how in the past 70 years the virtue of charity has been corrupted from a matter of individual choice and initiative to one of group [...]
1Jun2002 | P. Gardner Goldsmith | 0 comments | ContinuedThe War on Charity
“Congress is going to rebuild Afghanistan for billions, and they can’t take care of 3200 people,” complained Kenneth Foster, husband of one of the September 11 victims, at a public hearing earlier this year. In his view, and that of many other victims’ families, who vigorously applauded his remarks, the September 11 Victims’ Compensation Fund [...]
1Jun2002 | Doug Bandow | 1 comment | ContinuedPublic Money for Private Charity
After years of being shunned and even persecuted, Christians suddenly enjoyed the official blessing of the Roman state when Emperor Constantine came to power in 324 A.D. For the first time, imperial funds were used to subsidize priests and churches. Christians emerged from hiding in Rome’s catacombs to partake of the state’s largess. A faith that might have saved an empire was thus corrupted and in the end proved to be a futile safeguard against Rome’s ultimate destruction at the hands of barbarians a century and a half later.
1Aug2001 | Lawrence W. Reed | 3 comments | Continued-
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