‘Free Enterprise Zone’ Archives
National Insecurity: Betraying Our Ideals Without Even Knowing It
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman There’s a country that earlier generations might not recognize in which the national government’s criminal investigative agency can execute its own warrants without court approval; present them to private companies and demand information about people who are not necessarily suspected of [...]
Obama’s Landgrab Nightmare
By Alan Caruba There are ten planks in the Communist Manifesto and it will come as no surprise to anyone to discover that they are being implemented by the Obama administration in league with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The first plank called for the abolition of all private property ownership and [...]
Government as Consumer
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Destutt de Tracy, as I discussed in the June issue, was a French economist whom Thomas Jefferson did his utmost to bring to the attention of America. The first part of Tracy’s A Treatise on Political Economy (1817), the translation of which Jefferson arranged, is a primer in economics that [...]
To Hell With Free Trade
By Alan Caruba It’s funny how bits of knowledge stick in your head. Literally a half century ago, while taking a history class at the University of Miami, a professor said, “Nothing happens in the world until someone sells something to someone else.” The study of history can help one understand the present and frequently help [...]
Foreign Lenders: Friends Indeed to a U.S. Treasury in Need
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Robert Higgs When the U.S. government wishes to spend more money than it receives as tax revenue, it covers the shortfall by borrowing, and foreign lenders have become increasingly important sources of such borrowed funds. Reliance on foreign lenders is as old as the republic. Indeed, loans from the [...]
On the Bloated Intelligence Bureaucracy
Texas Straight Talk with Ron Paul I have often spoken about the excessive size of government, and most recently how waste and inefficiency needs to be eliminated from our military budget. Our foreign policy is not only bankrupting us, but actively creating and antagonizing enemies of the United States, and compromising our national [...]
Obama, The Nation Killer
By Alan Caruba The unemployment rate keeps climbing and the polling results for the President and Congress keep falling. Conservatives are well aware that the Obama administration has relentlessly pursued legislation harmful to the economy, but just how bad it is and how bad it will become in 2011 may not have sunk in fully for the public [...]
The Art and Science of Pseudology
The Freeman, Thomas S. Szasz M.D. The common belief that the scientist’s job is to reveal the secrets of nature is erroneous. Nature has no secrets; only persons do. Secrecy implies agency, which is absent in nature. This is the main reason the so-called “behavioral sciences” are not merely unlike the physical sciences but are in many [...]
Good Economists, Bad Economists, and Walmart
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Lawrence W. Reed Good economists are seldom popular with the political class. This is not unique to democratic systems; dictators like good economists even less. Why? As a rule, politics doesn’t educate. It obfuscates, pontificates, and prevaricates. It often seeks to advance the interests of the [...]
Obama Takes Illinois Mistakes Nationwide
By Phyllis Schlafly "Unsustainable" is a scary word that recently entered political discourse, coming authoritatively from Congressional Budget Office (CBO) Director Douglas Elmendorf. Unsustainability is the operative moniker for Barack Obama's massive deficit spending, which Elmendorf said "cannot be solved through minor tinkering." The [...]
Update on China’s Version of Free Trade
By Phyllis Schlafly "Free trade" has become an article of faith and a sort of mantra with many conservatives, but, as the old saying goes, "it takes two to tango," and, indeed, it takes two countries to engage in free trade. Let me give you an update on Communist China's version of Free Trade. Millions of tons of Chinese drywall, or gypsum [...]
Regulatory Magic
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman The more the rules change the more they stay the same. President Obama has signed the financial industry regulatory overhaul – officially, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Predictably, what he said about it cannot possibly be true. For example: “hese [...]
Will America’s Police Become Federales?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Wendy McElroy Police unions across America are moving closer to being federalized. The Public Safety Employer-Employee Cooperation Act of 2009 was reintroduced in the Senate by Majority Leader Harry Reid on April 12, where it currently awaits debate. The act is part of a supplemental appropriations [...]
More Border-Picture Economics
The Freeman, T. Norman Van Cott I suggested in the May issue that an aerial photograph of the border between barren Haiti and the heavily forested Dominican Republic was a predictor of the recent Haitian earthquake devastation. Not the earthquake, mind you, but the devastation that followed. The property-rights vacuum that encouraged [...]
Subsidizing More College Students Won’t Help the Economy
The Freeman, George Leef Governments in the United States subsidize college education heavily. State universities charge students very low tuition rates, and the federal government has a host of grant and loan programs designed to make college affordable to most families. (As politicians make those programs more generous, schools have spent [...]
When There Is No Rule of Law
Texas Straight Talk with Ron Paul Last week ended with some promising news on finally stopping the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Unfortunately, the administration still seems to believe that shutting down working oil wells is a higher priority than effectively dealing with the broken one. They are again issuing a moratorium on [...]
The Rise of Government and the Decline of Morality
The Freeman, James A. Dorn The recent financial crisis has expanded the power of government. Tea parties have revealed the disillusion of millions of Americans with the rise of government and the decline of morality. The crisis has damaged, unfairly, the vision of market liberalism. It is essential, therefore, to reexamine and articulate [...]
$8 Gas If You Can Find It
By Henry Lamb Following Rahm Emanuel’s advice, the Obama administration is certainly not letting the Gulf oil crisis go to waste. The BP catastrophe is just what Obama needed to justify pushing his irresponsible energy policy on a weary nation. Obama wants to stop using fossil fuel in favor of more exotic alternative energy sources. He [...]
Deficit Hawks or War Hawks?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Last week’s TGIF asked if the American people can afford a world-girdling foreign policy more befitting an empire than a republic. Look at it this way: War hawks make poor deficit hawks. Facing a $13 trillion national debt and trillion-dollar-plus annual budget deficits, we can’t [...]
Are Profits Fit Only for Serfs and Slaves — Richard W. Fulmer
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Richard W. Fulmer In their recent book, From Poverty to Prosperity, Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz relate that ancient Romans believed it honorable to gain wealth through battle and conquest, but dishonorable to profit by engaging in commerce. Such work was considered so demeaning that it was left to the [...]
A Free-Market Energy Vision — Robert L. Bradley Jr.
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Robert L. Bradley Jr. Energy is the master resource. Without it other resources could not be produced or consumed. Even energy requires energy: There would not be usable oil, gas, or coal without the energy to manufacture and power the requisite tools and machinery. Nor would there be wind turbines or [...]
Funding Corruption and Waste in Afghanistan — Ron Paul
Texas Straight Talk with Ron Paul Last week, GOP chairman Michael Steele came under fire for daring to say what a lot of Americans already know – that our involvement in Afghanistan is an ill-advised quagmire with no end in sight. After nearly 10 years and approaching $1 trillion spent, the conflict is going nowhere because there is [...]
Why Doctors Don’t Want Free-Market Medicine — Theodore Levy
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Theodore Levy You may have heard that the AMA and “America’s physicians” favor universal health care. That’s true of the AMA, but that organization represents fewer than 20 percent of the nation’s doctors. And it’s true of many academic university physicians, but anecdotally it is obviously [...]
Can America Afford an Empire? — Sheldon Richman
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Fiscally speaking, the U.S. government has been running a disorderly house for some time. That makes the fiscal crisis in Greece an uneasy portent for Americans (as Steven Horwitz points out here). Just contemplate some of the numbers. The total federal debt is nearly $13 trillion, $8.6 [...]
Why Optimism Seems so Irrational — Steven Horwitz
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz Over the last several weeks my columns have made a variety of arguments about why the world is a much better place than it used to be and why we should be optimistic about the future. In last week’s column I mentioned Matt Ridley’s new book, The Rational Optimist, which I heartily [...]
More Power for the Fed — Ron Paul
Texas Straight Talk with Ron Paul Last week I was pleased to see my Republican colleagues take up the cause to fully and completely audit the Federal Reserve by including my language from the Federal Reserve Transparency Act in a Motion to Recommit the financial regulation reform bill. Although this effort was defeated by the Democrat [...]
The Smart State — William L. Anderson
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, William L. Anderson Modern Progressives love the term “smart” to describe their approach to everything from zoning to energy. For them, attempts to expand the role of the State are smart, which means free markets must be “stupid.” By the late nineteenth century, Progressives believed that [...]
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 [...]
Greece: The Canary In the U.S. Coal Mine? — Steven Horwitz
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman,Steven Horwitz With everything that was going on in the U.S. economy this past winter, the beginnings of the crisis facing the Greek economy were certainly easy to miss. As that crisis has now come to full flower, American observers overlook it at their peril: Greece’s problems, and those of other [...]
The Cause Of, And Cure For Economic Woes — Henry Lamb
By Henry Lamb The Washington leadership never misses an opportunity to blame the last eight years of Bush policies for the economic problems that have befallen the nation. CNN news touts a poll that says 53% of the people blame Republican policies for the mess. Both are wrong. Republicans certainly contributed over the years, but the cause [...]
