All Posts Tagged With: "wealth transfer"

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 | | 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 | | 8 comments | Continued

A Philanthropist Goes to Washington

In philanthropy, as in other human undertakings, there are degrees of performance, from inspired to disappointing. Because the very act of generosity merits some credit, we are reluctant to give an entirely negative rating to any donor, but sometimes a philanthropist comes along who tests our forbearance. A case in point is Ruth Lilly, heiress [...]

1May2003 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Transfer Society

The story of Robinson Crusoe has been used to illustrate many economic points. So let’s try this question. What if, instead of working and cooperating to produce as much food, shelter, clothing, and other goods as they could, Crusoe and Friday instead spent most of their time fighting over the division of what nature readily [...]

1Aug2002 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Economics of Infantilism

While this year’s Winter Games were still going on, the website of the National Organization for Women was complaining that with all the Olympic coverage, the press had neglected to notice the 400-person rally, dubbed the “March for Our Lives,” held simultaneously in Salt Lake City. Led by organizations from the Poor People’s Economic Human [...]

1Jun2002 | | 1 comment | Continued

Tethered Citizens

The welfare state exists to transfer resources from those who produced them to those who did not. There can be countless motives for effecting a transfer: to equalize incomes; to feed and house the poor; to eradicate drug use; to promote exports; to inhibit imports; to subsidize business and agriculture; to certify the safety of [...]

1Dec2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States by Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks

W.W. Norton & Company · 2000 · 379 pages · $26.95 Reviewed by George C. Leef Readers of this magazine will automatically be inclined to look askance at the title of this book. The United States slid into socialism, sometimes at a rapid pace and sometimes slower, during most of the twentieth century. Things don’t [...]

1Dec2001 | | 1 comment | Continued

Winners and Losers in the Transfer Game

I like lists, be they David Letterman’s Top Ten lists, the mainstream historians’ best-presidents lists, or my wife’s honey-do lists. They tell us much about the kind of society in which we live. Frequently, these lists reveal more about whoever compiled them than about whatever data is actually included on them. One list in particular [...]

1Sep2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

School Choice via the Universal Tax Credit

School choice—the general concept that parents should have much more freedom and responsibility for their children’s education than they have now—is an idea that has captured the imagination and support of legions of freedom-loving Americans. Where the rubber hits the road, however, is how to achieve it.

1Sep2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

Reflections on Self-Responsibility and Libertarianism

Nathaniel Branden is the author of 20 books, including The Art of Living Consciously, Taking Responsibility, and most recently, My Years with Ayn Rand. His Web site is www.nathanielbranden.net. The traditional American values of individualism, self-reliance, self-discipline, and hard work had their roots, in part, in the fact that this country began as a frontier [...]

1Apr2001 | | 3 comments | Continued

Blessed Debt

Should we cut taxes or pay off the national debt? What’s missing from this picture? Aside from the fact that paying off the debt need not be a priority (there is no connection between the debt and economic growth), the question is a classic case of the Fallacy of the False Alternative. If we accept [...]

1Apr2001 | | 0 comments | Continued

Unhappy Returns

Harry Dolan is a writer and editor in Bowling Green, Ohio. On August 13, 1920, a confidence man named Charles Ponzi was arrested for running a pyramid scheme that had cheated investors out of millions of dollars. Ponzi had promised his investors a 50 percent return after 45 days, and he was able to deliver, [...]

1Feb1999 | | 0 comments | Continued

Nightmare in Green

Jarret Wollstein is a founder and director of the International Society for Individual Liberty, a global libertarian organization with members in over 70 countries. He is also the author of eight books, including Lethal Compassion: Why Government Medicine Is the Cure that Kills (with Mary Ruwart). “The threat of an environmental crisis will be the [...]

1Sep1998 | | 3 comments | Continued

Money for Nothing: Politicians, Rent Extraction, and Political Extortion by Fred McChesney

Harvard University Press • 1997 • 230 pages • $35.00 Roger Meiners is a professor of law and economics at the University of Texas-Arlington and senior associate at the Political Economy Research Center. As F. A. Hayek explained in his introduction to The Road to Serfdom, a half-century ago the future of the world was [...]

1Apr1998 | | 0 comments | Continued

Government and the Market: Chicken or Egg?

John Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation, a nonprofit think tank based in Raleigh, North Carolina. One evening not too long ago, I was invited to participate in a debate about state welfare policy. As much of our work at the John Locke Foundation had been directed toward various welfare bills in the [...]

1Mar1998 | | 0 comments | Continued

The Tobacco Deal: Myths and Misconceptions

Robert Levy is senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and author of the Cato Policy Analysis, “Tobacco Medicaid Litigation: Snuffing Out the Rule of Law.” The deal being forced on tobacco companies, whether it is the original negotiated agreement or one amended according to President Clinton’s liking, is manifestly unconstitutional and nothing [...]

1Jan1998 | | 1 comment | Continued

Ring in the New!

The new year reminds us that the turn of the millennium approaches. (That is true whether you celebrate the occasion in 2000 or 2001.) Let’s not forget that it is also the end of the century that Paul Johnson dubbed the century of politics. Will it be succeeded by the century of liberty? Developments are [...]

1Jan1998 | | 0 comments | Continued
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