All Posts Tagged With: "special interests"

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 | | 0 comments | Continued

Repeal Davis-Bacon

After Hurricane Katrina ravaged much of the Gulf Coast, President Bush ordered the suspension of the federal Davis-Bacon Act, which mandates that workers on all federally financed construction projects of more than $2,000 (virtually all, that is) be paid the “prevailing wage” of the project location. The suspension would have covered only the parts of [...]

1Dec2005 | | 1 comment | Continued

Why Classical Liberals Care about the Rule of Law (And Hardly Anyone Else Does)

In 1776 John Adams declared that America was “a
nation of laws, not men.” Politicians of all persuasions
have used Adams’s phrase ever since to claim
the moral high ground. Such rare agreement among the
political classes, even if only rhetorical, is an indication
of the power of the idea of the rule of law.

1Nov2005 | | 2 comments | Continued

America Needs Socialized Medicine?

Jane Orient, M.D. is executive director, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. Paul Krugman attributes “America’s Failing Health” to the lack of Canadian-style socialized medicine and thus to the persistence of a free-enterprise sector in American medicine (New York Times, August 27). Because “interest groups are too powerful, and the antigovernment propaganda of the right [...]

1Feb2005 | | 1 comment | Continued

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 [...]

1Dec2004 | | 0 comments | Continued

Why 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 [...]

1Dec2004 | | 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 | | 2 comments | Continued

Politics Corrupts Money

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 strange bedfellows as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce [...]

1Jan2004 | | 0 comments | Continued

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 [...]

1Dec2003 | | 7 comments | Continued

The Market Endangers the Arts?

Where a man sits often determines where he stands. Dana Gioia, who now sits as the head of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), is living proof of this dictum. In the course of defending a bigger NEA budget, Gioia told an approving Frank Rich of the New York Times last June: “If you [...]

1Sep2003 | | 1 comment | Continued

To Subsidize or Not to Subsidize

As a fan of Gilbert and Sullivan, I participate in an Internet e-mail forum known as Savoynet, where everything about the famous librettist and composer of late Victorian comic opera comes under discussion. Recently a forum participant lamented the demise more than 20 years ago of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, which began producing the [...]

1Jun2003 | | 0 comments | Continued

No Shortcuts

For about ten years a number of writers sympathetic to the free market have rejoiced that more and more Americans have become shareholders in corporations through retirement accounts and direct investing. These commentators predicted that widespread stock ownership would effect a radical change in Americans’ attitudes about economic policy. No longer would they be sympathetic [...]

1Feb2003 | | 0 comments | Continued

I, Government

I am government–the institution known the world over to all who pay taxes, get subsidies, and face regulation. Coercion is both my vocation and my avocation; it is in my very nature to compel others to do that which they otherwise would not do. My nature should then be of great concern to you as [...]

1Oct2002 | | 1 comment | Continued

Ironic Triangle

“No man’s life, liberty or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” -Unidentified New York Surrogate Court judge, 1866 “President Bush has strongly hinted that he will sign any bill that emerges from Congress.” -New York Times, July 17, 2002 Did you hear the one about the congressional committee that grilled the businessman [...]

1Oct2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

What Do Farmers Want from Me?

You’d think in a democracy that the greater the number of people on your side of an issue, the more likely it will be that you’ll get your way. But it ain’t necessarily so. As Mancur Olson, Gary Becker, and others have pointed out, in politics, small is often beautiful. Take farmers. When farmers were [...]

1Sep2002 | | 2 comments | Continued

The Bias Favoring Governments over Markets

The thrust of my columns could be summarized as follows: We would be better off increasing our reliance on the voluntary cooperation of the marketplace and reducing our reliance on government commands. This is not an idle assertion reflecting blind ideology or religious zeal, as some would claim. It is based on an impressive foundation [...]

1Jun2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

A New Old American Concept of Political Liberty

It is odd that a libertarian should have a conception of political liberty at all. Isn’t it the case that there is a permanent war between freedom and politics? Surely any reduction in the political sphere produces a concomitant increase in individual liberty. Has not choice in the market, characterized by personal autonomy and spontaneity, [...]

1Mar2002 | | 0 comments | Continued
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