All Posts Tagged With: "special interests"
The Financial Bailouts: “See the Needle and the Damage Done”
On Wednesday, September 17, 2008, according to the New York Times, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke used “a speaker phone from his ornate office” to tell Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson “that it was time to adopt a comprehensive strategy that Congress would have to approve” for dealing with the financial-market troubles. After a second call on [...]
27Feb2009 | Lawrence H. White | 8 comments | ContinuedHow Bad Can it Get?
In August the Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF) in Washington state released its State of Labor 2008 (the Report), which warns of several perils emanating from the growth of government-sector collective bargaining and offers suggestions for ameliorating them. (The Report is available in PDF here .) I predict these perils will soon be much more severe [...]
20Jan2009 | Charles W. Baird | 0 comments | ContinuedPutting a Bureaucrat in Your Tank: Gasoline Markets and Regulation
If you run a barrel of crude oil through a still, the technique used by the earliest refineries and still a stage in modern refining, it separates into various fractions, including kerosene, gasoline, diesel, fuel oils, waxes, and asphalt. Without further processing, about 10 percent will be “straight run” gasoline. In the 1870s this 10 [...]
1Oct2007 | Andrew P. Morriss | 0 comments | ContinuedHow a Free Society Could Solve Global Warming
The phrase“global warming” has been around for quite some time, but in the past year it has captured the spotlight as never before. One can’t turn on the radio or open a newspaper without facing ads from “green” corporations, or hearing the latest way to reduce one’s “carbon footprint.” With even prominent Republicans (such as [...]
1Oct2007 | Gene Callahan | 1 comment | ContinuedTwo Presidents, Two Philosophies, and Two Different Outcomes
In the White House, Wilson intended to be a strong president working with a “living Constitution.” He promoted the expanding of “beneficent” government into new areas. In his second year as president he concluded that shipping rates were too high, and he blessed his secretary of treasury’s plan to regulate overseas shipping rates and the companies doing the shipping.
1Jun2007 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Great Contraction, 1929-33
The recession that began in mid-1929 need not have become a disaster. Many downturns had occurred previously in U.S. economic history, and nearly all of them had been fairly shallow and soon followed by recovery and continued growth. In the nineteenth century most people had believed that the government neither knew how nor possessed the [...]
1Apr2007 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedWelfare 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 Murphy | 1 comment | ContinuedWhy Not More Liberty?
Russell Roberts holds the Smith Chair at the Mercatus Center and is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. His latest book is The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance.
There are two extreme views of American government and the political process. One is that policy [...]
Separate the Professions and the State
Lewis Andrews (lew@yankeeinstitute.org) is executive director of the Yankee Institute for Public Policy in Hartford, Connecticut.
Since the early 1990s, and even through the collapse of the stock-market bubble, the American economy has continued to experience remarkable increases in worker productivity, both in manufacturing, which now accounts for 14 percent of the nation’s output, and in [...]
What Friends of Freedom Can Learn From The Socialists
On March 14, 1883, a German philosopher living in exile in London passed away. When he was buried three days later in a modest grave where his wife had been laid to rest two years earlier, fewer than ten people were present, half of them family members. His closest friend spoke at the gravesite and [...]
1Oct2004 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedHow 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 to [...]
Politics Corrupts Money
George Leef is book review editor of The Freeman.
In September the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the heated battle over campaign finance reform legislation—the so-called Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, or BCRA. That law, passed by Congress and signed by President Bush in 2002, has been challenged by a wide array of parties, including such [...]
The Absurdity of "Saving Jobs"
Timothy Terrell teaches economics at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
In any period of economic distress there is a renewed search for political solutions to unemployment. It seems obvious that jobs must be saved, and the government must be the key to preserving those jobs. So we get another round of government intervention: economic stimulus [...]
The Other Political Story
Unfortunately, last year’s presidential election was a mess. Unfortunately, the congressional elections were not.
While it proved difficult to determine who won the presidency, it was not difficult to determine who controlled Congress. Only six House incumbents lost, yielding a re-election rate of 98.5 percent.
1Apr2001 | Doug Bandow | 0 comments | ContinuedBarbarians at Bill Gates
William Shughart is the Frederick A. P. Barnard Distinguished Professor of Economics and holder of the Robert M. Hearin Chair in Business Administration at the University of Mississippi.
It was a glorious fall day on the East Coast when Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Joel Klein stepped up to the microphone at a news conference called [...]
Regulatory Extortion
Thomas DiLorenzo is a professor of economics at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland. This article is based on a presentation prepared for the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s conference, “Austrian Economics and the Financial Markets,” last September in Toronto.
In 1978 Michael Jensen and William Meckling, writing in the Financial Analysts Journal, offered an extraordinarily gloomy prediction [...]
Alternate Route: Toward Efficient Urban Transportation by Clifford Winston and Chad Shirley
Brookings Institution • 1998 • 120 pages • $36.95 cloth; $15.95 paperback
Urban transportation in America suffers from gross inefficiencies. The source of these inefficiencies is political intervention that pushes transportation policy away from cost-effective solutions and toward the distribution of benefits to favored groups—predominately transit managers and suppliers of transit inputs (that is, labor unions, [...]
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Montessori, Dewey and Capitalism: Educational Theory for a Free Market In Education
By Jerry Kirkpatrick
