Tough on Immigration Is Tough on Economic Growth

Not to be outdone by Arizona’s tough immigration law of 2010, Alabama and Georgia legislators passed their own immigration bills in 2011. The bills received a great deal of media attention because they were widely touted as good for growth and job creation, and were harsher on illegal immigrants than Arizona’s law. In a New [...]

Poverty Is Easy to Explain

Academics, politicians, clerics, and others always seem perplexed by the question: Why is there poverty? Answers usually range from exploitation and greed to slavery, colonialism, and other forms of immoral behavior. Poverty is seen as something to be explained with complicated analysis, conspiracy doctrines, and incantations. This vision of poverty is part of the problem [...]

Herbert Spencer: Libertarian Prophet

At the time of his death a century ago, the English social theorist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was widely considered one of the most significant thinkers of his era, a scholar of encyclopedic learning and enormous vision whose works formed a regular part of university curricula in philosophy and the social sciences. Today he is seldom [...]

The 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. [...]

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 [...]

Scratching 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 [...]

Book 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
  

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 [...]

Minimum Wage, Maximum Folly

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, in 1997, has been ‘fully eroded.’ ” Among these economists were Nobel laureates such as [...]