All Posts Tagged With: "social problems"
Ought Implies Can
Too often ethical pronouncements have an air of hubris about them, as the pronouncer simply assumes we can do what he says we ought to do. By contrast, economics demands some humility. We always have to ask whether it’s humanly possible to do what the ethicists say we ought. To say we ought to do something we cannot do, in the sense that it won’t achieve our end, is to engage in a pointless exercise. If we cannot do it, to say that we ought to is to command the impossible.
24Apr2009 | Steven Horwitz | 35 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.
The Sixteen-Trillion-Dollar Mistake: How the U.S. Bungled Its Priorities from the New Deal to the Present
The Sixteen-Trillion-Dollar Mistake is an interesting, but fundamentally flawed book. Those who share the author’s ideological position (more on that in a moment) will find the book a treasure-trove of information to support their preconceptions. Most people, however, will be hard-pressed to wade through the tome’s biased economic misconceptions. Jansson starts out innocently enough, writing, [...]
1Oct2002 | Bruce S. Jansson | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Government Can Do: Dealing With Poverty and Inequality by Benjamin I. Page and James R. Simmons
University of Chicago Press · 2000 · 309 pages · $29.00 Reviewed by Martin Morse Wooster One of the major triumphs of liberty in the 1990s was in welfare reform. In the 1980s, scholars—notably Charles Murray—who contended that welfare demeaned those who accepted it and ensured lifetimes of dependence on the dole were condemned as [...]
1Oct2001 | Martin Morse Wooster | 0 comments | ContinuedSpencer’s Law: Another Reason Not to Worry
One of the constant themes of today’s media is crisis and panic. Everywhere we look we are told there is some dreadful social problem, a threat to all that is good and true. Moreover, it is getting worse and will bring disaster upon all of us—unless “we do something.” (The authors of these jeremiads always [...]
1Aug2001 | Stephen Davies | 0 comments | ContinuedIn Service of a Boondoggle
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a nationally syndicated columnist. He is the author and editor of several books, including The Politics of Envy: Statism as Theology (Transaction). Service has a long and venerable history in America. And so it continues today. Three-quarters of American households give to charity. An [...]
1Sep1996 | Doug Bandow | 0 comments | Continued-
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