All Posts Tagged With: "Public Choice"
In Defense of Ideology
There have been many statements recently to the effect that we should not let “ideology” or “philosophy” stand in the way of solving our economic problems. Indeed, the Obama administration (like the previous Bush administration) is keen to persuade us to drop all this prejudice and to go after each problem–banking, stimulus, and so forth–on [...]
19Aug2009 | Mario Rizzo | 1 comment | ContinuedPredictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions
As the title suggests, Predictably Irrational is another offering on behavioral economics. The overriding theme is that people not only tend to behave irrationally, but they do so in systematic and predictable ways. Thus our lapses from rational behavior reinforce each other rather than cancelling out. The evidence for this comes largely from experiments which [...]
21May2009 | Dwight R. Lee | 1 comment | ContinuedInfluence-Peddling
Since the New York Times published its page-one story alleging an inappropriate link between Senator John McCain and telecommunications lobbyist Vicki Iseman, we’ve heard much more about the evil of “influence-peddling.” The day the Times story ran, Senator Barack Obama debated Hillary Clinton, saying, “Washington has become a place where good ideas go to die. [...]
1May2008 | John Stossel | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – March 2008
- Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
by Bryan Caplan Reviewed by Dwight Lee - The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World
1Mar2008 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | Continued
Sprawl versus Coastal Beauty
Timothy Terrell is an associate professor of economics at Wofford College in South Carolina. “It’s a bad idea to turn the whole future of a region over only to people with money to make.” So says a local college professor, John Lane, in a recent editorial in one of our community newspapers. The article described [...]
1Jun2007 | Timothy Terrell | 0 comments | ContinuedDownsizing the Federal Government
By Chris Edwards Reviewed by J. H. Huebert
1May2007 | Jacob H. Huebert | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – October 2006
- Reviving the Invisible Hand: The
Case for Classical Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century
by Deepak Lal Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
- Laws of Fear
by Cass Sunstein Reviewed by Donald J. Boudreaux
- Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an
Empire’s
Slaves
by Adam Hochschild Reviewed by Becky Akers
- Why Men Earn More
by Warren Farrell Reviewed by George C. Leef
Legal Plunder Mislabeled “Defense”
Arnaud de Borchgrave of United Press International has been reporting on national intelligence matters for many years. In a recent dispatch he wrote that “[s]ome 15,300 earmarks in the U.S. defense budget, up 1,300 percent in the 21st century, are so many pork projects for lawmakers’ constituencies that have nothing to do with defense.” That [...]
1May2006 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedTariffs, Blockades, and Inflation: The Economics of the Civil War
In concise and clear prose Professors Mark Thornton and Robert Ekelund use basic economics to explain the causes, outcome, and consequences of the Civil War. Employing Public Choice theory—a subdiscipline of economics that focuses on how public officials and government bureaucracies make decisions—Thornton and Ekelund attempt to revise many standard accounts of the war. Although [...]
18Mar2006 | John Majewski | 0 comments | ContinuedMeltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media
Climatologist Patrick Michaels gives us a nontechnical and readable exposé of the “myths and facts” surrounding global warming. For skeptics of the mainstream global-warming hypothesis, that is, that dramatic, human-induced warming is occurring and will have cataclysmic effects if not checked by lifestyle-altering public policies, this book is a great read and an indispensable reference. [...]
14Dec2005 | Roy Cordato | 0 comments | ContinuedGovernment Should Fund Science?
Thomas Friedman, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist, is beside himself because the 2005 federal budget contains a 2 percent, or $105 million, cut for the National Science Foundation (NSF). As W. S. Gilbert would say, “Oh, horror!” This, Friedman predicted in his December 5, 2004, column (“Fly Me to the Moon”), will condemn [...]
1Mar2005 | Sheldon Richman | 1 comment | ContinuedGovernment, Fiscal Responsibility, and Free Banking
Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. This paper was delivered at a conference on “One Hundred Years of Dollarization, or a Century without a Central Bank: The Case of Panama,” sponsored by Fundación Libertad in Panama City, Panama, on November 12, 2004. There has been no greater threat to life, liberty, and property throughout [...]
1Feb2005 | Richard M. Ebeling | 1 comment | ContinuedA Tale of Regulation
When we speak of regulation, we often apply the lessons on a macroeconomic scale (“regulation costs the economy X billions of dollars a year”) or examine how it affects a particular industry, like oil. However, regulation is not merely something imposed on the large firms or spread evenly across the economy; it is something that [...]
1Oct2004 | William L. Anderson | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Trouble with Government
Why does the federal government perform so badly, asks Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University? It’s a step in the right direction for a political “liberal” even to pose that question. But although Bok notes several factors that inhibit the efficiency of Washington, he seldom addresses the most important failure of government: attempting to [...]
10Feb2003 | Doug Bandow | 0 comments | ContinuedPublic Finance and Public Choice: Two Contrasting Visions of the State
So there I was in the late ‘60s, an undergraduate economics major at BYU, a very conservative institution. My introductory textbook was Paul Samuelson’s Economics; my history of economic thought textbook was Robert Heilbroner’s The Worldly Philosophers; and for my public finance course we used The Theory of Public Finance by Richard A. Musgrave. In [...]
1Nov2000 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | ContinuedWill Campaign Finance Reform Enhance the Power of the People?
A common cry among the reform set these days is that there is too much money in politics. Those who decry the role of money in politics imagine a world where the 535 members of Congress along with the president sit around in togas discussing the best way to serve the people. Rather than being [...]
1Sep2000 | Russell Roberts | 0 comments | ContinuedEconomic Illiteracy
Paul Cleveland is an associate professor of economics at Birmingham Southern College in Birmingham, Alabama. Outing the fall semester, the first examination given to my principles-of-economics students included this: Discuss the following statement: When an economic function is turned over to the government, social cooperation invariably replaces self-interest as the motivation for human action. The [...]
1Apr2000 | Paul A. Cleveland | 1 comment | Continued-
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