All Posts Tagged With: "welfare"
The Never-Ending Welfare Debate
Norman Barry, a contributing editor of Ideas on Liberty, is professor of social and political theory at the University of Buckingham in the UK. He is the author of An Introduction to Modern Political Theory (St. Martin’s Press). After a long struggle, a “revolutionary” welfare reform bill, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act [...]
1Mar2001 | Norman Barry | 5 comments | ContinuedRelying on Relatives
One of the highlights of the 2000 presidential campaign was Winifred Skinner. You may remember her—she was the can-collecting 79-year-old woman who used the money from her foraging for tin and aluminum to finance her prescription drugs. She was interviewed on Good Morning America about her plight, and Al Gore highlighted her story in his [...]
1Mar2001 | Russell Roberts | 1 comment | ContinuedWhy Classical Liberals Should Love Harry Potter
As anyone with children can tell you, the Harry Potter books by British author J. K. Rowling have taken the world by storm. Now in its fourth installment, this series of stories about the education of a young British wizard at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry is wildly popular with children and adults alike. [...]
1Dec2000 | Andrew P. Morriss | 0 comments | ContinuedEconomics on Trial
“There is a strong case for reducing the role of the government budget in providing health services beyond a minimum.” —Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht[1] How Many of You Are on Food Stamps? At the recent San Francisco Money Show, I asked an audience of several hundred investors, “By a show of hands, how many [...]
1Dec2000 | Mark Skousen | 0 comments | ContinuedIncentives and Disincentives: They Really Do Matter!
“If you encourage something, you get more of it. If you discourage something, you get less of it.” Whoever first said that deserves a medal for putting to words one of the most profoundly important elements of human nature. Human beings respond—often powerfully—to both incentives and disincentives. An understanding of this great truth is critical [...]
1Nov2000 | Lawrence W. Reed | 3 comments | ContinuedMore Liberty Means Less Government: Our Founders Knew This Well
Statist “liberals,” take cover. Your sacred cows are fair game in this hard-hitting work by a witty, insightful, and even radical hunter of wrongheaded conventional wisdom somehow mesmerizing the mainline media, clergy, Congress, academe, and other purveyors of mulish political correctness. Did I say Congress? Well, hear the author, professor of economics at George Mason [...]
1Aug2000 | William H. Peterson | 3 comments | ContinuedThe Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy by Anthony Giddens
The Polity Press • 1999 • 166 pages • $19.95 paperback The importance of this book lies in the fact that its author is often and with good reason described as the guru of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. It tells us much about the thinking of politicians of his kind. The social democratic parties [...]
1Mar2000 | Antony Flew | 0 comments | ContinuedA Better Brand of Parent
Marshall Fritz is the founder of the Separation of School & State Alliance in Fresno, California (www.sepschool.org). After World War II, aborigines in New Guinea scraped clearings in the brush in hopes that planes would land and bring “cargo.” They’d seen U.S. forces do similar scrapings, and soon thereafter, great silver birds landed and disgorged [...]
1Sep1999 | Marshall Fritz | 3 comments | ContinuedPolitical Accounting
Why does the federal government, according to its own auditors, squander tens of billions of tax dollars year after year? Attempts to understand the actions of politicians and bureaucrats on the basis of private-sector decision-making are doomed to failure. Efforts to “fix” government by ending specific boondoggles are quixotic crusades. Government will continue to be [...]
1Sep1999 | James Bovard | 9 comments | ContinuedBogus Freedom
“Freedom from want” is one of the most frequently invoked notions of freedom in our time. However, it is a bogus freedom that politicians and socialists offer to lull people into accepting policies that destroy true freedom. Freedom from want has been most loudly advocated in this century by those who favored removing almost all [...]
1May1999 | James Bovard | 0 comments | ContinuedSecond-Guessing the Market
John Sparks is chairman of the department of business administration, economics, and international management at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. We commonly think of people below the poverty line as the only beneficiaries of welfare. But poor families are not the sole recipients of government money. Some of America’s largest and most successful companies get [...]
1Apr1999 | John A. Sparks | 1 comment | ContinuedI Lost My Job, Can I Keep My Principles?
Mark Reboul is a computer programmer and musician who lives in New York City. I accidentally discovered a great party trick: Get laid off from your job, tell someone about it, listen to them decry capitalism, wait for them to observe that you’re entitled to collect unemployment, and then tell them you’d really rather not. [...]
1Apr1999 | Mark Reboul | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Savings Crisis
John Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation, a non-profit think tank based in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the author of The Heroic Enterprise: Business and the Common Good (The Free Press). It’s a constant refrain among politicians and the news media: America has a low savings rate. This, it is said, has dire [...]
1Mar1999 | John Hood | 0 comments | ContinuedWhy the War on Poverty Failed
Well, it’s now official: the war on poverty was a costly, tragic mistake. Ordinary people have suspected that for decades, of course, but we had to wait for the New York Times to decide this news was fit to print—which it finally did on February 9, 1998. In a front-page story on poverty in rural [...]
1Jan1999 | James L. Payne | 11 comments | ContinuedThe Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities
Sanford Ikeda is an associate professor of economics at Purchase College—SUNY in New York. There are many ways to tell the story of urban-policy failure. Economists have shown how rent control creates housing shortages, sociologists how welfare programs destroy poor communities, and urbanologists how urban planning can debilitate cities. In his book The Future Once [...]
1Nov1998 | Sandy Ikeda | 0 comments | ContinuedCharacter and Government Policy
Dale Walsh, who resides in Atlanta, is a fomer public school teacher. While growing up, I assumed that all people valued freedom and therefore did not want intrusive government. Throughout my early schooling I was taught to admire our country’s Founding Fathers, who threw off British tyranny to unleash the most free society the world [...]
1Jul1998 | Dale E. Walsh | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Taiwan Model
Hugh Macaulay was Alumni Professor of Economics Emeritus at Clemson University. He was a visiting professor at National Taiwan University in Taipei from August 1984 to July 1985. People at all times in the past and everywhere on earth today have wanted to enjoy economic growth and prosperity, as well as political and personal freedom. Unfortunately, [...]
1Jul1998 | Hugh Macaulay | 0 comments | Continued-
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