All Posts Tagged With: "subsidies"

Government the Job Killer

President Obama says government will have to build the nation out of the economic trough. “We’re the country that built the intercontinental railroad,” Obama says. “So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads?” I guess Obama doesn’t know that the transcontinental railroad was a Solyndra-like Big Government scandal. The [...]

4Jan2012 | John Stossel | 4 comments | Continued

The Importance of Failure

In today’s society failure has become something to fear, avoid, and therefore prevent at all costs. Whether it is unemployment compensation, farm subsidies, or bailouts for failing companies, the world seems to view failure as having no redeeming social value. If success is all good and failure is all bad, then it seems as though [...]

26Oct2011 | and and Steven Horwitz | 11 comments | Continued

The Gilded Age: A Modest Revision

Mark Twain named the decades after 1865 the “Gilded Age,” and Progressive historian Vernon Louis Parrington sketched them in some detail in 1927. For Parrington (Main Currents in American Thought, volume 3), the Gilded Age was a “Great Barbecue” of continuous government largesse and State-assisted capital accumulation under a very simple philosophy: “[P]reemption [of land] meant exploitation [...]

21Sep2011 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 4 comments | Continued

What’s Wrong with Government Funding of the Arts

People who oppose Soviet-style collective farms, government subsidies to agriculture, or public ownership of grocery stores because they want the provision of food to be a private matter in the marketplace are generally not dismissed as uncivilized or uncaring. Hardly anyone would claim that one who holds such views is opposed to breakfast, lunch, and [...]

24Aug2011 | Lawrence W. Reed | 7 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

NPR Quotes Reed on State Arts Subsidies

In a recent report on state governments’ ending subsidies to the arts, National Public Radio included quotes from FEE President Lawrence W. Reed, such as: “Arts are simply too important to be dependent upon the government.” Listen to the audio file here.

13Jun2011 | Tsvetelin M. Tsonevski | 0 comments | Continued

America’s Greatness Requires War and Taxes?

New York Times columnist David Brooks thinks America is great but in trouble, and he wants to take steps to preserve American preeminence. He’s right, though not in the way he thinks. In his November 11, 2010, column Brooks argued that we need some sort of National Greatness Agenda; the problem is that his conception [...]

21Apr2011 | Aeon J. Skoble | 1 comment | Continued

The Progressive Income Tax and the Joy of Spending Other People’s Money

On August 31, 1910, Teddy Roosevelt traveled to Kansas to make a stirring speech in support of a federal income tax. “The really big fortune,” Roosevelt said, “the swollen fortune by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men [...]

21Apr2011 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 5 comments | Continued

Civil War and the American Political Economy

The task before us is to assess in largely material terms the political-economic system arising during and after the American Civil War. Ideological issues existed, certainly, but much evidence suggests that pure idealism had a rather limited run. Antislavery was one of many themes generally serving as the stalking horse for more practical causes. Slavery [...]

23Mar2011 | Joseph R. Stromberg | 4 comments | Continued

America’s Turning Point

The Civil War represents the simultaneous culmination and repudiation of the American Revolution. Four successive ideological surges had previously defined American politics: the radical republican movement that had spearheaded the revolution itself; the subsequent Jeffersonian movement that had arisen in reaction to the Federalist State; the Jacksonian movement that followed the War of 1812; and [...]

23Mar2011 | Jeffrey Rogers Hummel | 22 comments | Continued

No Subsidies for Nukes!

As Japan struggles to contain the damage to its nuclear-power plants, there’s much hand-wringing in the United States over what the government’s policy toward the domestic nuclear industry ought to be. President Obama supports government subsidies in order to replace carbon-emitting energy sources. That policy was wrong before the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, and it’s [...]

17Mar2011 | Sheldon Richman | 2 comments | Continued

The Canard of “Underutilized Resources”

Last November the Federal Open Market Committee announced plans to purchase, by printing money, $600 billion of long-term government bonds over the next 6 months. This “quantitative easing,” Fed Chairman Bernanke assures us, is necessary to aid an economy that is suffering from “a very high level of underutilization of resources.” In other words, there’s [...]

24Feb2011 | Tyler Watts | 1 comment | Continued

“Big Meat” and Big Government

Inviting authoritarian oversight into your competitor’s business always seems like a good idea at the time, but when the same authorities start pounding on your door the notion loses some of its charm.

14Feb2011 | Paul Schwennesen | 5 comments | Continued

Rare Earth Elements: Stockpile or Markets?

Quick, what do you know about lanthanum, praseodymium, neodymium, or dysprosium? If you said they are chemical elements, you are right: numbers 57, 59, 60, and 66, to be exact. They and their neighbors on the periodic table, collectively “rare earths,” were once mere curiosities tucked in between barium and tungsten. Now they’re having their day [...]

24Nov2010 | Warren C. Gibson | 3 comments | Continued

Scotland: Seven Centuries since William Wallace

I am an American of Scottish extraction, and few things stir my blood more than the colorful history of my ancestral homeland. Through the centuries, rugged Scots stand tall among those heroes who gave every ounce of their lives for such noble ideals as liberty, independence, and self-reliance. Mel Gibson’s epic film Braveheart, released in [...]

24Nov2010 | Lawrence W. Reed | 7 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

There’s Too Little Trust in Government?

There is one point on which I can unequivocally agree with E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s, column “Can We Reverse the Tide on Government Distrust?”: “So far, the Obama administration has missed the opportunity to demonstrate . . . how it is changing the way government works. How is its approach to . . . regulations [...]

22Oct2010 | Charles Johnson | 2 comments | Continued
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