All Posts Tagged With: "rent-seeking"

Guilt by Corporate Association

Economists who support deregulation while having links to corporations should not be accused of being shills without clear and specific evidence of a quid pro quo.

19May2011 | Steven Horwitz | 7 comments | Continued

Roots of Egypt’s Revolt

A “rent-seeking” political system that cemented its hold on society put Egypt in a perpetual pre-revolutionary situation and created a powerful, but quite brittle, security situation.

21Feb2011 | Nouh El Harmouzi | 12 comments | Continued

Intellectual 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 | Continued

Malts in the Cafeteria

“Elect me and we will have malts in the cafeteria … every day!”

2Aug2010 | Tracy Stone Lawson | 14 comments | Continued

The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America

As I read them, our British authors, the sharp and witty Washington-based editors of the weekly London-based Economist, are modern-day if imperfect Alexis de Tocquevilles, updating Democracy in America by some 165 years. Recall the shrewd Tocqueville’s prescience in seeing how America, then but 45 years old and supposedly constrained by the Constitution, could wax [...]

10Jul2010 | William H. Peterson | 0 comments | Continued

Unions Lose Respect

I have often argued that American labor unions enjoy much more respect than they deserve. In February the Pew Research Center released the results of its latest nationwide survey of public opinion regarding labor unions. It seems that, at last, labor unions are suffering significant losses of respect. Table 1 shows the percentage of Americans [...]

29Jun2010 | Charles W. Baird | 8 comments | Continued

Are Profits Fit Only for Serfs and Slaves?

In their recent book, From Poverty to Prosperity, Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz relate that ancient Romans believed it honorable to gain wealth through battle and conquest, but dishonorable to profit by engaging in commerce. Such work was considered so demeaning that it was left to the children of freed slaves. Because of the associated [...]

29Jun2010 | Richard W. Fulmer | 6 comments | Continued

The American Land Question

Widespread landownership long supported a kind of liberal-republican independence. Perhaps we should reexamine the nexus and ask ourselves how, in Donald Davidson’s words, we “let the freehold pass,” and whether that was really for the best.

10Jun2009 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 6 comments | Continued

Lost Articles

The Constitution says that to be elected to the U.S. Senate, a person has to be 30 or older, a citizen for at least nine years, and a resident of the state from which the candidate is elected. Alas, it says nothing about knowing American history. Good thing for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). He’d have [...]

1Jun2007 | Sheldon Richman | 6 comments | Continued

Tolls on the Road to Serfdom

D.W. MacKenzie is an assistant professor of economics and finance at SUNY Plattsburgh. Many people think their taxes are too high and that the tax system is unfair. While those who favor individual liberty might find this encouraging, the specific reasons for discontent are not entirely positive. Many Americans think the current system is unfair [...]

1Apr2007 | D.W. MacKenzie | 0 comments | Continued

Welfare for the Rich

Advocates of the free market—including those considered “right-wing” and “conservative”—believe it is wrong to violate property rights. Consequently, they oppose egalitarian measures to steal from the rich and give to the poor. Such “income redistribution” represents naked theft and epitomizes the Founding Fathers’ fears of unfettered democracy. At the same time, champions of laissez faire [...]

1Apr2007 | Robert P. Murphy | 10 comments | Continued

The Rent-Seeking Habit

Wal-Mart’s CEO and his chief nemesis, the head of the Service Employees International Union, have joined forces. They recently appeared together at a news conference to endorse universal health care, sugared words for medicine by coercive bureaucracy. No, this is not another article about why a government-based medical system is a terrible idea. This is [...]

16Feb2007 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued

Climate Change: What if They’re Right?

What do Pat Robertson, Gregg Easterbrook, and Michael Shermer have in common? They’ve all moved from climate-change skepticism to the “global warming consensus.” These leading lights may help guide others toward this consensus too. And given the possibility that believers in global warming are right, I’d like to be charitable and suppose that, first, this [...]

1Jan2007 | Max Borders | 20 comments | Continued

Japan, Germany, and the End of the Third Way

Norman Barry is a professor of social and political theory at the University of Buckingham, UK, the country’s only private university. Last year’s election results in Japan and Germany are not only important for those countries but also have wider lessons, for they herald a decisive defeat for a once-fashionable doctrine—the Third Way. This was [...]

1May2006 | Norman Barry | 1 comment | Continued

Full Context

In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith famously wrote, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” It may seem strange that history’s best-known advocate of the free market would cast such aspersions [...]

1Apr2006 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Broadband: A Basic Right?

It’s 2006. You really want a broadband high-speed Internet connection, but you live in a small American city with a population of 100,000. So the broadband providers have decided it would not be profitable to come to your town at this time. What do you do? First, get mad. Then, form an interest group. Finally, [...]

1Mar2006 | Max Borders | 0 comments | Continued

How Nineteenth-Century Americans Responded to Government Corruption

James Rolph Edwards is an associate professor of economics at Montana State University-Northern. From its origin as a distinct secular scientific discipline with the French Physiocratic school in the middle of the eighteenth century, and the British classical school that followed, economics had a pro-market, limited-government orientation. Indeed, intellectual historians and political philosophers often refer [...]

1Apr2004 | James Rolph Edwards | 2 comments | Continued
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