All Posts Tagged With: "taxation"
The End of Prosperity: How Higher Taxes Will Doom the Economy–If We Let it Happen
If you were to believe spokesmen for the Obama regime and its allied pseudo-economists, there is no tradeoff between the size of government and our standard of living. On the contrary, they would like people to believe that the bigger the government gets, the more it can “stimulate” the economy and solve all sorts of [...]
18Nov2009 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedNews Flash: FDR Didn’t Restore Prosperity!
The New Deal did not end the Great Depression. This statement will come as no shock to Freeman readers, but it will to the many people who have never encountered it before. Now people are encountering it—in newspaper columns and news-talk shows.
Why, after years of being taught that Franklin Roosevelt’s economic intervention saved the country [...]
The Threat of Tax Centralization Hovers Over Europe
Are Europe’s politicians about to undo one of the most decisive safeguards for freedom on the Old Continent? These days the talk in European chancelleries is all about clamping down on citizens who seek to protect their wealth in more amicable environments. The European Union and its predecessors have been progressively centralizing tax systems in [...]
1Dec2008 | Pierre Bessard | 0 comments | ContinuedBailing Out Statism
The key to understanding the saga of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—the newly nationalized twin government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) that dominate home financing—is this:
They were created—intentionally—to distort the housing and mortgage markets. That is, government planners were not content to let voluntary exchange and spontaneous market forces configure those industries unmolested. So—holding the taxpayers hostage—they intervened.
Make [...]
Are You Being Served?
“In the animal kingdom,” said psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, “the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined.” It is important to use words carefully, to use words that have as exact a meaning as you can achieve. Those who manage to persuade others to use the words they wish [...]
1Nov2008 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | ContinuedCommerce, Markets, and Peace: Richard Cobden’s Enduring Lessons
Edward Stringham is a visiting associate professor of economics at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. A longer version of this article won second prize (faculty division) in the 2003 Olive W. Garvey Fellowship Program for the Independent Institute and is reprinted in Opposing the Crusader State: Alternatives to Global Interventionism, edited by Robert Higgs and [...]
1Oct2008 | Edward P. Stringham | 0 comments | ContinuedA Property-Rights Theory of Mass Murder
Stephen Carson, a software engineer, writes independently from St. Louis. This article is condensed from “Killing and Stealing: A Property-Rights Theory of Mass Murder,” which first appeared in The Independent Review, Winter 2007, and was reprinted in Opposing the Crusader State: Alternatives to Global Interventionism, edited by Robert Higgs and Carl P. Close (The Independent [...]
1Sep2008 | Stephen W. Carson | 0 comments | ContinuedPerspective ~ An Unstimulating Idea
“It’s like taking a bucket of water from the deep end of a pool and dumping it into the shallow end.”
That’s how George Mason University economist Russell Roberts describes the logic—rather, illogic—of the economic “stimulus” proposals that everyone and his uncle have been proposing.
If we needed further demonstration of the folly that is the American [...]
A Department of Homeland Happiness Security? Only if We Want to Be Unhappy!
Richard Ebeling (rebeling@fee.org) is the president of FEE.
It is more than 230 years since Adam Smith observed that each individual is a better judge of how best to apply his productive efforts than any statesman who would direct the economic activities of the citizenry. Furthermore, Smith said, any such power “would nowhere be so dangerous [...]
The Times that Tried Men’s Economic Souls
Two hundred and thirty years ago this month in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, the brutal and storied winter of 1777–78 came to a long-awaited close. Nearly a quarter of George Washington’s Continental Army troops encamped there had died—victims of hunger, exposure, and disease. Almost every American knows that much, but few can tell you why Congress [...]
1Mar2008 | Lawrence W. Reed | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Game of Politics
In a recent column in Metro magazine, published in Raleigh, North Carolina, the former chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Jim Leutze, lamented that “calling for conservation [is] like shouting down a well.” He is unhappy that the state legislature has so far resisted proposals to increase taxes to fund the kinds [...]
1Jan2008 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedAlcohol, Prohibition, and the Revenuers
The standard account of America’s experience with alcohol Prohibition centers on ideology. This account states that citizens were so infused with Progressive hubris that they set forth in 1919 on a futile quest to mandate morality by banning the manufacture and sale of liquor. But when they recognized that Prohibition was failing, Americans abandoned the [...]
1Jan2008 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 0 comments | ContinuedEconomics and Property Rights
Economic theory does not operate in a vacuum. Institutions, such as the property-rights structure, do not change economic theory but influence how the theory manifests itself. Similarly, the law of gravity is not repealed when a parachutist floats gently down to earth. The parachute simply determines how the law of gravity manifests itself. Failure to [...]
1Jan2008 | Walter E. Williams | 0 comments | ContinuedNeed and Public Policy: Handle with Care
In public-policy debates the word most commonly invoked as the ace in the hole is “need.” However, “need” needs careful handling.
“Need” has the political advantage, but the logical disadvantage, of lacking a clear meaning. That allows it to be systematically abused to distort understanding and to reach desired conclusions that justify picking people’s pockets to [...]
Are High Taxes the Basis of Freedom and Prosperity?
In the November 2006 Scientific American, Jeffrey Sachs, economic consultant to governments and the UN, argues (yet again) for higher U.S. taxes and more government officials with ever-increasing powers over their subjects. These perennial and inevitable conclusions are hung (here) on a Nordic peg.
According to Sachs, F. A. Hayek, “the Austrian-born free-market economist, . . [...]
A Sennholz Sampler
Editor’s Note: Hans Sennholz, a former president and trustee of FEE and long-time chairman of the economics department at Grove City College, died in June at age 85. We honor his memory with three of the many articles he contributed over the years.
“Jobs and Trade,” July 1996
Unemployment is the great puzzle of our time. It [...]
Freedom and the Role of Government
Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE.
What is the role of government? This has been and remains the most fundamental question in all political discussions and debates. Its answer will determine the nature of the social order and how people will be expected and allowed to interact with one another—on the basis of either force [...]
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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
