Posts Tagged ‘the freeman’
Paying the Unemployed Does Not Stimulate the Economy
Free Enterprise Zone, James C.W. Ahiakpor, The Freeman Many in Congress as well as the President and some of his economic advisers have argued that extending the period for paying the unemployed will stimulate the U.S. economy out of its sluggish performance. Would any of them consider as valid an argument that giving money out of their own [...]
Yet Again with the National ID — Becky Akers
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Becky Akers Fresh from their defeat in forcing national identity papers on us with REAL ID, the feds are trying once more. Their plea this time isn’t terrorism but immigration—though they’re pretty much the same, according to the State. Introduced in 2005 to combat the waves of terrorists [...]
Seeing the Big Picture Is Child’s Play — Steven Horwitz
When I was younger I thought airplanes were the coolest thing ever. In that way only kids (especially boys) can, I learned everything about the major commercial jets in the early 80s and was particularly fascinated by airline schedules and the hub-and-spoke system developing around that time. Most of that fascination was vicarious, since I [...]
What a World We Live In — Steven Horwitz
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz The last two years have, for the most part, not been good for those who care about free markets and human prosperity. The financial crisis and recession have led to a major increase in the size and scope of government intervention in the economy, and many people have seen their [...]
Class Struggle Rightly Conceived — Richman
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Karl Marx is famous for drawing attention to the idea of class struggle. Yet remarkably in 1852, historian David Hart recounts, Marx wrote, “s far as I am concerned, the credit for having discovered the existence and the conflict of classes in modern society does not belong to me. Bourgeois [...]
Orient Express to Hell — James Bovard
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, James Bovard In 1986 and 1987 I slipped behind the Iron Curtain a few times to study economic perversity and political slavery. In November 1987 I flew into Hungary before heading on to the most repressive regime in Europe. The train from Budapest to Bucharest, Romania, was called the Orient Express. The [...]
It’s All State Capitalism — Sheldon Richman
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman David Brooks For the Defense David Brooks, the New York Times resident conservative op-ed writer, is power’s best friend. He always tries to make it look so benign. In a column this week he begins by warning that we should not be fooled by the current friction between the government and [...]
Producing Jobs: Thoughts on Obama’s Plan for Small Businesses — Bruce Yandle
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Bruce Yandle The ears of small business America must have perked up when President Obama spoke about that critically important sector in his State of the Union address. Mine certainly did. Here’s when it really got interesting: “I’m . . . proposing a new small business tax credit—one that will go to [...]
Do You Really Want Government Drilling for Oil?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman You’ve got to hand it to the people who really dislike free markets. They see markets everywhere, and especially wherever any serious problem arises. That no free market exists within a thousand miles makes no difference whatsoever. Take the oil spill in the Gulf. The market opponents [...]
Federal Deposit Insurance: A Banking System Built on Sand — Warren C. Gibson
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Warren C. Gibson Federal deposit insurance grew out of a turbulent time in American history: the Great Depression. During two waves of bank failures in the 1930s an astonishing 9,000 banks closed and millions of depositors lost some or all of their savings. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) [...]
How to Create the Illusion of Low Taxes
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, D.W. MacKenzie To the surprise of opponents of big government, the U.S Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) estimates that taxes at all levels of government take only 9.2 percent of our income, the lowest rate since Harry Truman was president. USA Today and various news-media personalities, like [...]
Anti-Federalists Vindicated
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman If the Antifederalists were still on the scene today, they might be saying — as they would have been saying right along — “Told you so.” The latest occasion is this week’s 7-2 Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Comstock et al., upholding a federal statute that permits [...]
Self-Regulation in the Corporate State: The BP Spill — Sheldon Richman
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman With some 7,000 barrels of oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico each day from BP’s exploded Deepwater Horizon well, offshore drilling and oil-industry regulation have returned to the front pages. The familiar old trap is set: Do you want unfettered markets and oil spills or [...]
Subjugating Ourselves — Sheldon Richman
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman In The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, the sixteenth-century French poet, judge, and political philosopher Étienne de La Boétie wondered: How it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a [...]
The Three Hats of the Economist — Steven Horwitz
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz I live in a small, rural town in the St. Lawrence valley of New York state. For the last three weeks and a few more to come, we have had no full-service grocery store. The company that had served the town for years had been in and out of bankruptcy and finally gave up the [...]
Immigration, the Tea Parties, and Big Government
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz The Arizona law enabling police to ask for immigration papers or proof of citizenship of anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally has fanned the flames of an already hot debate over immigration. How these issues play out in the Tea Party movement will be [...]
Anti-Populists Made America Great?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Joseph R. Stromberg New York Times neoconservative columnist David Brooks dislikes populism (“The Populist Addiction,” January 25). “Trust your betters and criticize not their deeds,” he says in effect. After all, when you become a billionaire, you’ll expect others to treat you thus. [...]
The Washington-Wall Street Kabuki Dance
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman When I watch the public furor over the ruling party’s attempt to “toughen” regulations on the financial industry, I get the same feeling I often have in a theater: Good show but it’s not real. There’s something eerily ritualistic about the current occupant of the White [...]
The Census: Vehicle for Social Engineering — Wendy McElroy
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Wendy McElroy In his book Seeing Like a State, James Scott commented on the role played by census data in the rise of the modern State: “If we imagine a state that has no reliable means of enumerating and locating its population, gauging its wealth, and mapping its land, resources, and [...]
Do We Need a VAT?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, William L. Anderson In the early 1980s, while the U.S. economy was suffering through a severe recession, Lester Thurow, dean of the business school at MIT and a Newsweek columnist, came up with what he thought was a great idea: a value-added tax. According to Thurow, a VAT would encourage production [...]
Is Capitalism Something Good?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Earlier this week I attended the annual meeting of the Association of Private Enterprise Education in Las Vegas to participate in a panel with the intriguing title “Free-Market Anti-Capitalism?” Organized by Roderick Long of Auburn University, the panel also included [...]
The Beautiful Tree Book Review
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Max Borders In the poorest parts of the world you’ll find private education. From Ghana to India to China, private schools are sprouting up everywhere. There are new schools opening where none were before. There are also new schools where government “free” schools already exist but languish. Why? [...]
Obey the (Natural) Law — The Goal is Freedom, not Slavery
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Tax Day approaches, and I’ve been thinking of all the ways government bullies us, demanding we do – and not do – things — or else. You can get into big trouble for not sending in a bunch of forms to the IRS by April 15 disclosing how much money you made last year. You can get [...]
The Insanity of Government “Reform”
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, William Anderson Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity – repeating something and expecting different results – is known to nearly everyone. Yet mere knowledge of this definition apparently has not kept the “best and the brightest” among us from becoming its practitioners. The belief that [...]
A Health Insurance Criminal Pleads His Case
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, James Payne If mandatory health insurance goes through, it will turn me into a criminal. I don’t have health insurance. I don’t want it. And I will refuse to buy it even though I can afford it. Before they lead me to the cell, perhaps the prisoner may be allowed to say a few words in his [...]
Let’s Take the “Crony” Out of “Crony Capitalism”
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, John Stossel When Judge Richard Posner, the prolific conservative intellectual, released his book A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent Into Depression last year, you might have thought the final verdict was in: Capitalism caused the economic downturn and high unemployment. That [...]
Presidents and Precedents and the Path to National Suicide
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Lawrence W. Reed America’s 44th president has embarked on a massive expansion of the federal establishment that, if accomplished, will dwarf all previous welfare states in its spending and debt. Americans will largely depend on politicians and their underlings for a significant portion of their heavily [...]
Must We Live in Long-Term Recession?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, William Anderson The current downturn, even if the recession “officially” is over, is beginning to look like a reply of the 1930s. In fact, the “Progressive” Atlantic recently ran a most depressing story about what happens as joblessness becomes institutionalized: The worst effects of pervasive [...]
Dangerous Historical Myths — Stephen Davies
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Stephen Davies One of the most powerful influences on human affairs is historical myth—beliefs about the past that are simply wrong. Some historical myths have far-reaching and baleful effects because they shape the way people understand not only the past but also the present, leading them to make harmful or [...]
Producing Jobs — Thoughts On Obama's Plan for Small Business — Bruce Yandle
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Bruce Yandle The ears of small business America must have perked up last month when President Obama spoke about that critically important sector in his State of the Union address. And mine did as well. Here’s when it really got interesting: “I’m … proposing a new small business tax credit -– one [...]
The Goal is Freedom — Obama and the Public
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Barack Obama, the current White House occupant, says that the people have a growing sense that “something is broken” in Washington. He attributes this to hyper-partisanship and a consequent lack of civility. As he put it Wednesday, “Those of us in Washington are not serving the people as [...]
The Republic of Obama
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Barack Obama, the current White House occupant, says that the people have a growing sense that “something is broken” in Washington. He attributes this to hyper-partisanship and a consequent lack of civility. As he put it Wednesday, “Those of us in Washington are not serving the people [...]
Frustrating Michael Moore — Sheldon Richman
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman If Michael Moore would study a little political economy he might turn into a potent champion of individual liberty. As we see in Moore’s new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore is offended by some truly offensive things: banks engaging in wild speculation without concern for the risk, [...]
Freedom in America – Is the Glass Half-full or Half-empty?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, George Leef It is an age-old question of perception. Show a person a glass with some liquid in it and ask, “Is it half-full or half-empty?” The importance of the answer depends on the interests of the person asking the question. If you owned a restaurant and wanted to skimp on the wine, you would rather [...]
The State of Obama's Union — Sheldon Richman
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman “he nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy. And America must be that nation.” That line from Wednesday night’s state of the union address was one of several in which the current White House occupant, Barack Obama, displayed a rather [...]
We Want to Be Regulated
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Bruce Yandle Efforts in Washington to write a major climate-change law are causing some Bootlegger/Baptist coalitions to fall apart and new ones to emerge. In late September Exelon Corporation, a major electric utility, followed industry partners Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and PNM when it resigned [...]
Coercive Care — William Anderson
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, William L. Anderson The recent loss of what supposedly was a “secure” U.S. Senate seat by Democrats in Massachusetts has triggered a firestorm of speculation about the future of the Democrats’ “health care” bill. For the current legislative season, so-called ObamaCare looks to be dead or at least [...]
Good, Bad, and Ugly of Deflation — Steven Horwitz
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz During the current recession a number of commentators have made various comparisons to the Great Depression, mostly because of the dramatic decline in the stock market and ongoing troubles in the financial industry. When oil prices also began a dramatic decline in the autumn of 2008, pulling the [...]
Principled Parties — Lawrence Reed
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Lawrence Reed Imagine a political movement that says it’s committed to “equal rights”—and means it. Not just equality in a few cherry-picked rights but all human rights, including the most maligned, property rights. Imagine a movement whose raison d’être is to oppose any and all special privileges [...]
Short Selling — A Primer — Warren Gibson
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Warren Gibson Short selling is a little-understood, much-maligned tactic by which traders can profit from their belief that a company’s stock is overvalued. Following the financial problems of the last two years, short selling has come under fire, with new or revived regulations proposed to curb the practice. [...]
Freedom In America — Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty? — George Leef
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, George Leef It is an age-old question of perception. Show a person a glass with some liquid in it and ask, “Is it half-full or half-empty?” The importance of the answer depends on the interests of the person asking the question. If you owned a restaurant and wanted to skimp on the wine, you would rather [...]
How Dense Can They Get? — Richard W. Fullmer
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Richard W. Fullmer When it comes to power, energy density is the key. Solar power, wind power, and ethanol are so expensive because they are derived from very diffuse energy sources. It takes a lot of energy collectors such as solar cells, wind turbines, or corn stalks covering many square miles to produce the [...]
Green-Economy Mirage — Andrew Morriss
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Andrew Morriss If you got an email offering you the chance to invest in a business that would create new profitable industries, employ millions of people, reduce energy consumption without reducing quality of life, and improve environmental quality, would you be skeptical? And if the email went on to claim that [...]
Keynesianism and Socialism — Vernon Orval Watts
Free Enterprise Zone, Mises Institute, Vernon Orval Watts Since Keynesians advocate so many forms of government intervention in the name of "full employment," it is not surprising to find them favoring it for other purposes. If government should take a man's earnings because he wants to save too much, why should it not take them on the ground [...]
