All Posts Tagged With: "welfare"
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 War Between the State and the Family: How Government Divides and Impoverishes
Sympathy and compassion help make humans caring, moral beings. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, understood that, as illustrated by his emphasis on sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
Often, however, sympathy and compassion are transformed from tools of moral judgment and action into weapons of blind ideology, irrational emotionalism, and cynical politics. They [...]
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 [...]
A Matter of Priorities
‘Tis the political season, which means the season to bash immigrants. This goes especially for so-called “illegal aliens,” that is, residents without government papers. (As if that’s a big deal.)
Candidates and others who are set on securing the Mexican border—the Canadian border seems of less concern—and expelling those who had the audacity to come to [...]
The Lesson of Ebenezer Scrooge
In 2003, I co-led a successful fight against Measure Q, which would have increased the Monterey County, Calif., sales tax to fund a failing government hospital. One proponent of the tax labeled me a Scrooge. She was referring, of course, to Ebenezer Scrooge, the protagonist of Charles Dickens’s famous novel A Christmas Carol—and of the [...]
1Dec2007 | David R. Henderson | 0 comments | ContinuedScratching By: How Government Creates Poverty as We Know It
The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one’s life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any [...]
1Dec2007 | Charles Johnson | 6 comments | ContinuedCasualties of the War on Poverty
Newspapers around the world recently carried a news item that seems to be a damning indictment of the U.S. government and the American people. The 2005 U.S. Census indicates that the percentage of poor Americans living in “severe” poverty was at a 32-year high. This put the proportion of poor people in deep poverty at [...]
1Dec2007 | Christopher Lingle | 0 comments | ContinuedBook Reviews – November 2007
- Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe
by Robert Gellately Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
- Depression, War, and Cold War
by Robert Higgs Reviewed by Burton Folsom, Jr.
- Great Philanthropic Mistakes
by Timothy Sandefur Reviewed by George C. Leef - Elements of Justice
by David Schmidtz Reviewed by Aeon J. Skoble
Book Reviews – 2007/9
- The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements
by Lynne Viola Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling
- In our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
by Charles Murray Reviewed by Michael Tanner
- Actual Ethics
by James R. Otteson Reviewed by Tibor Machan
- Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History
by Paul Moreno Reviewed by George C. Leef
1Sep2007 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | Continued
Ending the Welfare State Through the Power of Private Action
Richard Ebeling is the president of FEE.
Despair about the current direction of American public policy is easily understood. In whichever direction we look, government seems to be growing larger and more intrusive. For example, in February the Associated Press (AP) reported that in spite of the 1996 welfare reform, which has reduced the number of [...]
The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality
By Walter Benn Michaels Reviewed by George C. Leef
1Apr2007 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedMinimum Wage, Maximum Folly
Walter Williams is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics at George Mason University .
The big Associated Press story for last October 11 was that “More than 650 economists, including five winners of the Nobel Prize for economics, called Wednesday for an increase in the minimum wage, saying the value of the last increase, [...]
Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America
By Robert Reich Reviewed by George C. Leef
1Mar2007 | George C. Leef | 0 comments | ContinuedLudwig von Mises: The Political Economist of Liberty, Part II
Mises’s defense of classical liberalism against the various forms of collectivism was not limited “merely” to the economic benefits of private property.
1Jun2006 | Richard M. Ebeling | 0 comments | ContinuedJapan, Germany, and the End of the Third Way
Norman Barry is a professor of social and political theory at the University of Buckingham, UK, the country’s only private university.
Last year’s election results in Japan and Germany are not only important for those countries but also have wider lessons, for they herald a decisive defeat for a once-fashionable doctrine—the Third Way. This was adopted [...]
Estonia Moves to Liberty
Contributing editor Norman Barry (norman.barry@buckingham.ac.uk) is professor of social and political theory at the University of Buckingham in the U.K. He is the author of An Introduction to Modern Political Theory (St. Martin’s) and Business Ethics (Macmillan).
We have read a lot about former Soviet regimes struggling to shake off the last remnants of communism. It [...]
What’s Wrong with the Poverty Numbers
Robert Murphy teaches economics at Hillsdale College and is an adjunct scholar at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Midland, Michigan.
Last fall the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual report on poverty in the United States. The report indicated that the number of people below the official poverty line had risen from 32.9 million [...]
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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
