All Posts Tagged With: "wealth transfer"

Walter Lippmann: The Impossibilities of Social Planning

At the beginning of the twentieth century, observed historian A. J. P. Taylor, a law-abiding Englishman’s conscious relations with the government were limited to his contacts with the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked, and if he wanted to travel abroad he could do so without [...]

21Sep2011 | Harold B. Jones Jr. | 2 comments | Continued

Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive Vision of History

Over a hundred years ago, on August 31, 1910, Teddy Roosevelt gave his famous “New Nationalism” speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. In that speech the former president projected his vision for how the federal government could regulate the American economy. He defended the government’s expansion during his presidency and suggested new ways that it could promote [...]

22Sep2010 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 8 comments | Continued

The Paradox of the Welfare State

Welfare states face an inescapable paradox: The level of production needed to sustain a welfare state cannot be sustained by a welfare state. This paradox is created by policies that encourage the redistribution and consumption of wealth while discouraging its creation. In the face of such perverse incentives, living standards must fall even though, for [...]

22Sep2010 | Richard W. Fulmer | 24 comments | Continued

For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s

The latest New Deal synthesis is For the Survival of Democracy by veteran historian Alonzo Hamby of Ohio University. What makes Hamby’s research design different is that he describes the development of Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal in an international context. Specifically, he weaves the American narrative with events in Britain and Germany in [...]

8Jul2010 | Burton W. Folsom Jr. | 0 comments | Continued

Education Is the Effect, Not the Cause, of Affluence

Despite its abysmal record, the United Nations wears a mantle of legitimacy in the popular discourse. Almost every daily newspaper or nightly newscast reports some UN-sponsored agency’s activities regarding world hunger, climate change, disease, or some other problem. All too often the UN is on the wrong side of reality. Take its latest “solution” to [...]

7Jul2010 | Jude Blanchette | 1 comment | Continued

The Rule of Lawyers: How the New Elite Threatens America’s Rule of Law

Know any good lawyer jokes? They’re quite abundant and often tasteless, reflecting the widespread opinion that the legal profession is composed mostly of unethical rogues who say anything and do anything to squeeze money out of people. It certainly is not true that the entire legal profession consists of scoundrels practicing what amounts to legalized [...]

7Jul2010 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | Continued

What’s Wrong with Reparations for Slavery

There has been much debate recently about reparations for slavery. According to its proponents, the federal government should award Americans of African descent financial damages solely because slavery, as an institution, existed in the United States from the founding until almost a century later. Three principal arguments are offered: (1) The legacy of slavery has [...]

30Jun2010 | Stefan Spath | 16 comments | Continued

Plunder! How Public Employee Unions Are Raiding Treasuries, Controlling Our Lives and Bankrupting the Nation

Karl Marx was right—sort of. He was right in saying that society is riven by class warfare, but he got the classes wrong. It’s not the case that capitalists exploit workers, but rather that tax consumers exploit taxpayers. That truth has long been kept hidden from the average American by deceptive propaganda about the workings [...]

29Jun2010 | George C. Leef | 1 comment | Continued

U.S. Agricultural Programs: Who Pays?

E. C. Pasour, Jr. is professor emeritus of agricultural and resource economics at North Carolina State University. He is coauthor with Randal R. Rucker of Plowshares and Pork Barrels: The Political Economy of Agriculture (Independent Institute, 2005). The Economist labeled the recently enacted 2008 farm bill “A Harvest of Disgrace” (May 24, 2008). The five-year [...]

1Nov2008 | E.C. Pasour Jr. | 1 comment | Continued

The Immorality of Redistribution

It has been proposed that government assistance programs like prescription drugs should be provided only to those who earn less than a certain income. The fate of such a policy can be predicted from what has happened to Medicaid. Intended to provide medical care for the poor, Medicaid has become “inheritance protection for the children [...]

1Mar2006 | Harold B. Jones Jr. | 1 comment | Continued

Africans Whom Westerners Should Heed

At the G8 Summit in Scotland last July, hosted by Britains Tony Blair, European and North American politicians (all of them white) cried crocodile tears for the plight of black Africans. Echoing a gaggle of actors, rock stars, socialist ideologues, Third World dictators, and other learned economic-development
experts, they called for another transfer of wealth from developed nations to the undeveloped ones of Africawhich, by most measures, would seem to exclude no country on the continent.

1Dec2005 | Lawrence W. Reed | 1 comment | Continued

Free Enterprise and Health Care

Any discussion of free enterprise or of the free market requires a clear definition of these terms. Free refers to freedom of choice, not freedom from cost or responsibility. Free refers to freedom from regulation and restriction, other than those laws necessary to protect individuals from force and fraud. The free market implies the willful [...]

1Jul2005 | Frank J. Primich | 0 comments | Continued

Why the Social Security Tax Cap Shouldn’t Be Raised

In recent months Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, has suggested making all earned income up to $200,000 subject to the Social Security (FICA) tax. The current maximum on which Americans pay the tax is $90,000. This maximum rises every year based on a government estimate of real wage growth in the recent [...]

1Jun2005 | David R. Henderson | 1 comment | Continued

Creating Capitalists

Nothing is easier than thinking up ways to dispose of other people’s money. Most politicians devote their lives to this activity, but there is a robust amateur division as well. It consists of pundits, professors, and think-tank fellows who focus their energies on turning out endless plans for  transferring A’s income to B. The details [...]

1May2005 | Sheldon Richman | 0 comments | Continued

Global Corruption and the Interventionist State

Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE. In a recent survey of 50,000 people in 62 countries around the world, at least one out of every ten people admitted that he had bribed some corrupt political official or government administrator during the preceding 12 months. There seem to be very few places anywhere in the [...]

1Feb2005 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | Continued

The Most Insidious Tax

Dale Haywood is a professor of business at Northwood University and an adjunct scholar with the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, both in Midland, Michigan. People don’t generally spend and invest other people’s money as carefully as they do their own. This single, simple fact goes a long way toward explaining why capitalism works and [...]

1Jul2004 | Dale M. Haywood | 0 comments | Continued

Social Security: Mythmaking and Policymaking

Beginning in 1935, when Social Security was enacted, the program’s administrators made a huge effort to shape the public’s understanding of and beliefs about it. In speeches, articles, pamphlets, and other mass-circulation literature, they described Social Security as “insurance” under which workers pay “contributions” or “premiums” to receive “guaranteed” benefits that, being “paid for,” are theirs “as a matter of earned right,” without any means test.1

1Dec2003 | John Attarian | 7 comments | Continued
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