All Posts Tagged With: "property rights"
Libertarianism, from A to Z
Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron’s primer on libertarian thought proceeds just as the title indicates: a collection of alphabetically arranged short essays on 105 topics. This is a more effective technique than one might imagine: Since many people unfamiliar with libertarianism approach it by way of specific questions and challenges, Miron provides answers. Readers of [...]
4Jan2012 | Aeon J. Skoble | 3 comments | ContinuedRegime Uncertainty, Then and Now
In a 1997 article, “Regime Uncertainty: Why the Great Depression Lasted So Long and Why Prosperity Resumed After the War”, I advanced the idea of regime uncertainty in an attempt to improve our understanding of the Great Depression’s extraordinary duration and of the highly successful postwar transition to a genuinely prosperous market-oriented economy. The idea [...]
4Jan2012 | Robert Higgs | 4 comments | ContinuedWhich Strategy Really Ended the Great Depression?
“World War II got us out of the Great Depression.” Many people said that during the war, and some still do today. The quality of American life, however, was precarious during the war. Food was rationed, luxuries removed, taxes high, and work dangerous. A recovery that does not make—as Robert Higgs points out in Depression, [...]
24Aug2011 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 6 comments | ContinuedSlave Labor and Intellectual Property
If one favors property rights in tangible things, why would one not favor them in intangibles?
3Jun2011 | Sheldon Richman | 119 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 | ContinuedThe Progressive Income Tax and the Joy of Spending Other People’s Money
On August 31, 1910, Teddy Roosevelt traveled to Kansas to make a stirring speech in support of a federal income tax. “The really big fortune,” Roosevelt said, “the swollen fortune by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men [...]
21Apr2011 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 5 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 | ContinuedIntellectual Property: Silly or Sinister?
Imagine a land recently seized from a foreign power where there is little law and a lot of gold. Since nature abhors a vacuum, prospectors quickly adopt the conventions of private property: Whoever is first to put four stakes in the ground is the proud owner of the land and any gold beneath. This would [...]
22Dec2010 | David K. Levine | 33 comments | ContinuedThe Conquest of the United States by Militant Islam
In 1898 William Graham Sumner, a famous libertarian sociology professor at Yale University, gave a speech titled, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.” You read that right. In the same year the U.S. government had attacked Spanish forces in Cuba and the Philippines, a case of conquest by the United States, Sumner claimed [...]
24Nov2010 | David R. Henderson | 15 comments | ContinuedFree-Speech Clarity by California Courts
When kids get into complex arguments about who did what to whom, parents can usually sort through the miasma by focusing on a few key points. Whose toy is it? Which one of you threw the first punch? And likewise, almost every major debate in the political arena these days can be sorted out by [...]
24Nov2010 | Steven Greenhut | 3 comments | ContinuedPresidential Hubris
“If we were going to spend $700 billion, it seems it would be wiser having that $700 billion going to folks who would spend that money right away.” — Barack Obama
8Oct2010 | Sheldon Richman | 10 comments | ContinuedClassical Liberalism, Individualism, and Park51
Painting all Muslims or Islamic organizations with collective guilt goes against the essence of the individualist principles of classical liberalism.
14Sep2010 | Sandy Ikeda | 21 comments | ContinuedWhat Does the Oil Spill Prove?
You’ve got to hand it to the people who dislike free markets. They see them everywhere, especially wherever any serious problem arises. That no free market exists within a thousand miles makes no difference whatsoever. Take the oil spill in the Gulf. Market opponents are having a field day. They say this finally demonstrates the [...]
25Aug2010 | Sheldon Richman | 3 comments | ContinuedConfiscating Your Property
In America, we’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. Life, liberty, and property can’t be taken from you unless you’re convicted of a crime. Your life and liberty may still be safe, but have you ever gone to a government surplus auction? Consumer reporters like me tell people, correctly, that they are great places [...]
25Aug2010 | John Stossel | 6 comments | ContinuedThe Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier
I remember very well the images of the American West I received as a child. Movies, TV shows, and books convinced me that the West was excitingly wild and violent, with wars and gunfights as staples of everyday life. No doubt millions of others have grown up with the same idea, and a corollary—that the [...]
9Jul2010 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedMugged by the State
Most Americans believe that if they raise their kids well, attend church, work 9 to 5, and pay their taxes, they can pretty much go about life unhindered by the government. Certainly there are the annoyances and trivialities that occur when visiting the department of motor vehicles or the post office, but grisly tales of [...]
8Jul2010 | Jude Blanchette | 0 comments | ContinuedCapital Letters
Was There Money in the Original “Star Trek”? To the Editor: In the December 2004 issue of The Freeman, P. Gardner Goldsmith criticizes “Star Trek” for foolishly postulating that we could do without money. He presents us with an argument of the following structure: X is stupid; someone told him that “Star Trek” creator Gene [...]
8Jul2010 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | Continued-
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