All Posts Tagged With: "subsidies"
From Good Samaritan to Robin Hood
The clamor from interventionists against inequality morphs into a clamor for a larger and larger state. This path leads to the loss of liberty and a distortion of both democracy and justice. It distorts democracy because, by attempting to solve inequality, it removes limits to power and expands the field of state action. It distorts justice because the only way to solve inequality politically is for the state to have the power to treat individuals unequally. Thus the struggle to eliminate inequality ends up destroying the most important form of equality for an open society: equality before the law.
10Jun2009 | Carlos Rodríguez Braun | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Sage of Tampa
“The natural progress of things,” according to Thomas Jefferson, “is for government to gain ground and for liberty to yield.” But this lament does not suggest that the primary author of the Declaration of Independence was resigned to inaction. He also said, “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary [...]
1Apr2009 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | ContinuedGusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence.”
Al Gore recently called for a ten-year plan to phase out all electric plants powered by fossil fuels and replace them with windmills and other “renewable” energy sources. While the media fawned over Gore’s speech, I decided to read Robert Bryce’s Gusher of Lies to see if the speech made sense.
It doesn’t. Bryce’s book has [...]
Why on Earth Do We Have a Student Loan Crisis?
Amid all our other crises, you may have missed the student loan crisis. It isn’t nearly so life-threatening as global warming, nor as financially alarming as the subprime-mortgage collapse, but it does have a lot of politicians clamoring that the country needs them to prevent serious harm. That’s because—for reasons I’ll get to soon—many of [...]
1Nov2008 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedLet’s Not Be Energy Independent
“Energy independence” is a term that sounds good but falls apart on closer examination. Although the United States could achieve energy independence, we could do so only at an enormous cost. Energy “dependence” is much cheaper and much more desirable.
Before considering the costs and benefits of energy independence, I should define my terms. What is [...]
Freedom or Free-for-All?
Lawrence Reed became the president of FEE on September 1. To honor the occasion, we reprint his first “Ideas and Consequences” column, which was originally published in The Freeman in April 1994.
Imagine playing a game—baseball, cards, “Monopoly,” or whatever—in which there was only one rule: anything goes.
You could discard the “instruction book” from the start [...]
Hands Off “Windfall” Profits
You don’t have to like the oil companies to reject the windfall-profits tax. All you have to know is that if you tax something, you’ll get less of it. No one can seriously dispute this piece of common sense. That leaves the strong suspicion that the motive for the tax is punitive: those companies are [...]
1Jul2008 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Subsidy of History
Kevin Carson is the author of Studies in Mutualist Political Economy. He blogs at Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism.
A considerable number of libertarian commentators have remarked on the sheer scale of subsidies and protections to big business, on their structural importance to the existing form of corporate capitalism, and on the close intermeshing of corporate [...]
Health-Care Cons
Economist Joan Robinson (1903–1983) wrote, “The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of readymade answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.”
A better reason to study economics is to avoid being deceived by politicians; they are the far greater threat to life, liberty, and the [...]
Downtown Revitalization: City Governments Versus Consumers
What a thrill to visit cities that have “revitalized” their downtown areas! From the empty streets to the government offices to the abandoned retail spaces—what’s not to like?
Well, everything, of course.
Not only are such areas unsightly and useless, they often come at the expense of millions of taxpayer dollars and eminent-domain coercion.
There’s nothing wrong with [...]
Is Fair Trade a Fair Deal?
Gene Callahan is the author of Economics for Real People.
We’ve all seen the signs in our local cafes, boasting something like: “We proudly sell coffee brewed with Fair Trade coffee beans, acquired at a price that permits sustainable farming and pays growers a living wage.” These posters are part of a popular trend in “progressive” [...]
The New Deal and the State and Local Governments
Until the twentieth century the average American in peacetime had little contact with the federal government, except for the post office, and the federal government’s policies and actions affected most people only indirectly—for example, through land-disposition policies or the tariff’s effect on commodity prices. State and local governments provided nearly all the government services the [...]
1Mar2008 | Robert Higgs | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Fear of Free Trade
It’s hard to think of an issue that is more polarized than the one between free traders and protectionists. Those of us who favor free trade believe in the ethical principle that people should be free to buy from whomever they choose, and in the economic truth that wealth and efficiency increase as prices fall.
We [...]
Pundit in Wonderland
In one of those boilerplate articles about the deteriorating American middle class, Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson last September pointed out that a new Pew Research Center survey revealed that an increasing number of people think we live in a country divided into “haves” and “have-nots” and that more people now put themselves in the [...]
1Nov2007 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | ContinuedSomething Besides Money Growth Causes Inflation? It Just Ain’t So!
Howard Baetjer, Jr. is a lecturer in economics at Towson University.
Some economic phenomena can result from a variety of causes. A temporary increase in unemployment, for example, might be caused by a sudden, disruptive change in production technology, or in trade patterns, or in labor or tax laws; or it could be caused by natural [...]
Sprawl versus Coastal Beauty
Timothy Terrell is an associate professor of economics at Wofford College in South Carolina.
“It’s a bad idea to turn the whole future of a region over only to people with money to make.”
So says a local college professor, John Lane, in a recent editorial in one of our community newspapers. The article described Lane’s trip [...]
Book Reviews – June 2007
- Hitlers Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State
by Goetz Aly Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
- The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money
by Timothy P. Carney Reviewed by Sheldon Richman
- Income and Wealth
by Alan Reynolds Reviewed by George C. Leef
- The Sarbanes-Oxley Debacle What We Have Learned; How to Fix It
by Henry N. Butler and Larry E. Ribstein Reviewed by Barbara Hunter
- The Joy of SOX: Why Sarbanes-Oxley and Service-Oriented Architecture May Be the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You
by Hugh Taylor Reviewed by Barbara Hunter
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Book Reviews
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The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
By Arthur B. Laffer, Stephen Moore, and Peter J. Tanous
