All Posts Tagged With: "subsidies"

Is the Decline of Newspapers a Market Failure?

Over the past year there has been a flurry of government-related activity aimed at stopping the decline of the newspaper business. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has held three series of workshops on the subject, drawing dozens of top academics, national politicians, business leaders from companies like Google and News Corporation, and the FTC commissioners [...]

22Sep2010 | Edward J. López | 6 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

Capital Letters

Can There Be Free Trade in a Mixed Economy? To the Editor: Although I don’t see any flaws in your arguments about the theory of free trade in your column for the April 2004 issue of The Freeman, you should at least acknowledge the distortions in most any nation’s economy because of government intervention and [...]

5Jul2010 | FEE Admin | 0 comments | Continued

When Will They Ever Learn?

So here’s our lesson for today: If the government temporarily offers an extraordinary tax credit for buying a house, some people who were thinking of buying a home in the future will do so sooner and the market will be goosed. When the tax credit ends, sales will fall back into the doldrums. Imagine that.

2Jul2010 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Market-Based Higher Education

As experience continues to prove that private industry can do things more cost effectively and with better customer satisfaction than governmental entities, debate has shifted to what functions are appropriately in the government’s realm. Over the past several decades various institutions have arisen to challenge the notion that higher education is among the activities that [...]

29Jun2010 | Keith Wade | 1 comment | Continued

Subsidizing More College Students Won’t Help the Economy

Governments in the United States subsidize college education heavily. State universities charge students very low tuition rates, and the federal government has a host of grant and loan programs designed to make college affordable to most families. (As politicians make those programs more generous, schools have spent more and raised tuitions, thus creating an upward [...]

29Jun2010 | George C. Leef | 7 comments | Continued

A Free-Market Energy Vision

Energy is the master resource. Without it other resources could not be produced or consumed. Even energy requires energy: There would not be usable oil, gas, or coal without the energy to manufacture and power the requisite tools and machinery. Nor would there be wind turbines or solar panels, which are monuments to embedded fossil-fuel [...]

29Jun2010 | Robert L. Bradley Jr. | 5 comments | Continued

Nuclear Energy Should Be Subsidized?

In a March 5 Los Angeles Times op-ed, “Jump-starting Nuclear Energy,” Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore, who now co-chairs the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, lauds the Obama administration for its decision to “guarantee loans for two advance-design nuclear plants in Georgia.” Nuclear energy diversifies our energy portfolio and doesn’t pollute the air the way fossil [...]

20May2010 | Art Carden and Mike Hammock | 9 comments | Continued

Big Government’s Cronies

Many window-making companies struggle because of the recession’s effect on home building. But one little window company, Serious Materials, is “booming,” says Fortune. “On a roll,” according to Inc. magazine, which put Serious’s CEO on its cover, with a story titled: “How to Build a Great Company.” The Minnesota Freedom Foundation tells me that this [...]

20Apr2010 | John Stossel | 1 comment | Continued

Government Moonshine

From its minor role as an oxygenate additive for gasoline, ethanol has become the darling of Washington. Politicians embrace ethanol as a miracle elixir. All the fashionable energy buzzwords can be applied to it. It is “green power”; it’s “renewable” and will provide “energy independence” for America. Legislation has been promoting ethanol nonstop. The Energy [...]

24Mar2010 | Michael Heberling | 4 comments | Continued

About Those Tax Breaks

Few things bug free-market economists as much as the attempts by local and state authorities to give tax breaks to certain firms in the name of “creating jobs.”

6Jan2010 | William L. Anderson | 3 comments | Continued

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 | 2 comments | Continued

The 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 | Continued

Gusher 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 [...]

2Feb2009 | William L. Anderson | 2 comments | Continued

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 | 6 comments | Continued

Let’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 [...]

1Oct2008 | David R. Henderson | 10 comments | Continued

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 [...]

1Sep2008 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | Continued
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