All Posts Tagged With: "special interests"

Taxation Is the Lifeblood of the State

The cliffhanger debate over whether or not to raise the federal government’s debt ceiling threw U.S. fiscal policy into brighter relief than it has been in recent memory. Suddenly people were calling for significant cuts in government spending in the face of a rapidly growing national debt. As often happens, calls for cuts in government [...]

26Oct2011 | Arthur E. Foulkes | 4 comments | Continued

The Battle to Save American Street Vending

Larry Miller and Stanley Hambrick are classic American entrepreneurs. Both men started their businesses from scratch, and for more than 20 years they’ve been living their American Dreams. They each own and operate popular vending stands outside Turner Field in Atlanta, serving baseball fans with tasty snacks, fully licensed Braves merchandise, parody shirts, and other [...]

26Oct2011 | Bob Ewing | 11 comments | Continued

Walter Lippmann: The Impossibilities of Social Planning

At the beginning of the twentieth century, observed historian A. J. P. Taylor, a law-abiding Englishman’s conscious relations with the government were limited to his contacts with the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked, and if he wanted to travel abroad he could do so without [...]

21Sep2011 | Harold B. Jones Jr. | 2 comments | Continued

The Modern Union versus Workers’ Rights

The raging controversy in Wisconsin over eliminating collective bargaining “rights” for government employees cast a bright and harsh light on public-sector unions. Some commentators have distinguished public-sector unions from private-sector unions, but the vested interests of the two are much the same. Both are expressions of what might be called “the modern union,” which came [...]

22Jun2011 | Wendy McElroy | 4 comments | Continued

Shakedown: The Continuing Conspiracy against the American Taxpayer

Politics has one feature that sets it apart from all sorts of voluntary action: It employs coercion. Politicians can raid the wallets of taxpayers, forcing them to part with money they would rather spend, donate, or invest according to their own desires. Much of the money thus confiscated is then spent to succor special-interest groups [...]

22Jun2011 | George C. Leef | 5 comments | Continued

Bought and Paid For

Americans who have at least a modicum of political sophistication know that special-interest groups have enormous power to influence the political system, getting favors from government they couldn’t obtain through voluntary means. Informed people know, for example, that many farmers receive subsidies, that labor unions have privileges to employ coercion that no other private organization [...]

21Apr2011 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | Continued

The Fiasco of Prohibition

The national prohibition of alcohol, initiated by the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution and enforced via the Volstead Act, stands as an important illustration of the limits to social engineering. Prohibition failed to eliminate alcohol, and even exacerbated many of the social ills related to its consumption, because government is limited both by its knowledge [...]

22Dec2010 | Douglas Rogers | 19 comments | Continued

The Charade

Writing in Forbes recently, Dinesh D’Souza presents the bizarre idea that Barack Obama’s presidency can be best understood by realizing that “Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s [that is, Obama’s late estranged Kenyan father]. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world [...]

22Dec2010 | Sheldon Richman | 10 comments | Continued

Ideas versus Interests

One of my favorite quotes about the power of ideas comes from Ludwig von Mises in Human Action: “What determines the course of a nation’s economic policies is always the economic ideas held by public opinion. No government whether democratic or dictatorial can free itself from the sway of the generally accepted ideology.” This is [...]

22Dec2010 | Isaac M. Morehouse | 11 comments | Continued

The Distorting Effects of Transportation Subsidies

Although critics on the left are very astute in describing the evils of present-day society, they usually fail to understand either the root of those problems (government intervention) or their solution (the operation of a freed market). In Progressive commentary on energy, pollution, and so on—otherwise often quite insightful—calls for government intervention are quite common. [...]

22Oct2010 | Kevin A. Carson | 51 comments | Continued

Regulatory Failure by the Numbers

Between the current financial mess and the debate over carbon dioxide emissions controls, there is a lot of talk about regulation these days. We are told, for example, that the recession would have been prevented if proper regulations had been in place. While it is true that (by definition) the “right” regulations would have prevented [...]

25Aug2010 | and and Robert L. Bradley Jr. | 5 comments | Continued

Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media . . .

In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith explained the three forces at work against the establishment and maintenance of economic freedom. In his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith warned of the arrogance and danger of what he called “the man of system,” or the social engineer, who presumes to redesign man and society [...]

6Jul2010 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

Why Not More Liberty?

There are two extreme views of American government and the political process. One is that policy is the result of special interests rigging the system in their favor and exploiting the ignorant or at least impotent masses. The other is that government pretty much gives the people what they want. My own view is much [...]

5Jul2010 | Russell Roberts | 0 comments | Continued

Why Doctors Don’t Want Free-Market Medicine

You may have heard that the AMA and “America’s physicians” favor universal health care. That’s true of the AMA, but that organization represents fewer than 20 percent of the nation’s doctors. And it’s true of many academic university physicians, but anecdotally it is obviously untrue of most doctors in private practice. Many of those docs [...]

29Jun2010 | Theodore Levy | 16 comments | Continued

Greece: The Canary in the U.S. Coal Mine?

With everything that was going on in the U.S. economy this past winter, the beginnings of the crisis facing the Greek economy were certainly easy to miss. As that crisis has now come to full flower, American observers overlook it at their peril: Greece’s problems, and those of other European countries, might well represent a [...]

29Jun2010 | Steven Horwitz | 13 comments | Continued

Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses

In his previous book, The Big Ripoff (reviewed in the June 2007 Freeman), author Timothy Carney launched an attack on two of America’s preeminent political myths—that the Democrats are “the party of the little guy” and the Republicans are “the party of free enterprise.” Both notions are useful to candidates in the endless quest for [...]

20May2010 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | Continued

How We’ll Know When We’ve Won

“Are we winning?” That’s a query I hear almost every time I speak to an audience about liberty and the battle of ideas. Everyone wants to know if we should be upbeat or distraught about the course of events, as if the verdict should determine whether or not we continue the fight. Too many friends [...]

19Apr2010 | Lawrence W. Reed | 1 comment | Continued
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