‘Free Enterprise Zone’ Archives
Contraception: Insuring the Uninsurable
Free Enterprise Zone, Sheldon Richman, The Freeman Update below. Controversy rages over the Obama administration’s mandate that all employers – including Catholic hospitals and universities — include free contraception in their employee health insurance policies. Catholic officials object that since their church forbids [...]
Dependence on Government Highest In History
Mike Brownfield, Heritage Foundation When John F. Kennedy was President, just over a quarter of federal spending went to fund programs paying for some 21.7 million Americans to be dependent on Uncle Sam. But as high as that spending and dependence on the federal government was then, it has exploded today, with one in five Americans — more [...]
The Snow Plowers’ Petition
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz The following might have happened in a small college town in upstate New York… In a cold and snowy land there lived the people of the North Country. Some of them made a living by plowing and disposing of the snow that seemed to fall endlessly from the skies between November and March. [...]
Little Green Morons
BY ALAN CARUBA Michael Brune, the Executive Director of the Sierra Club, holds degrees in economics and finance from West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Coming Clean—Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal”, published in 2008 by the Sierra Club. Recently, Brune bragged that he and the board had turned [...]
Agenda-driven “science” at EPA
Newly proposed air pollution rules impose exorbitant costs for illusory health benefits BY WILLIE SOON AND PAUL DRIESSEN In December 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency released new Clean Air Act “National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants.” Once again, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson touted the supposedly huge [...]
Super Bowl Versus Education
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sandy Ikeda In the spirit of Super Bowl weekend I’d like to deconstruct a Facebook status update that a friend recently posted. It said: “If we took all the money from Super Bowl ads and spent it on educating our kids, we wouldn’t be America.” While the statement is rather oblique, I think [...]
That Jobs Thing Sure Didn’t Last Long
Obama rejects Keystone XL jobs, promotes more wind and solar subsidies. What to do now? BY PAUL DRIESSEN President Obama “is focused like a laser on putting people back to work,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) assured us last fall – echoing repeated statements by President Obama and Administration officials who “can’t [...]
Economics: The Cheerful Science
MARK W. HENDRICKSON, CENTER FOR VISION AND VALUES Chances are, you’ve heard economics referred to as “the dismal science.” That unflattering description is glib and catchy; it is also 100 percent wrong. Let me set the record straight and explain why economics—far from being dismal—is cause for hope, joy, cheer, and [...]
On Reagan’s Birthday, His Legacy Lives On
Mike Brownfield, Heritage Foundation Today marks President Ronald Reagan’s 101st birthday. Born in Tampico, Illinois, Reagan made his journey west to Iowa as a radio broadcaster, then on to California to take Hollywood by storm. He crossed America as a spokesman for General Electric, and then — after discovering the import of conservative [...]
The Hidden Costs of Recruiting Abroad
BY CARL BANKSTON III As reported in today’s New York Times, a number of U.S. universities are trying to make up their budget shortfalls by recruiting tuition-paying foreign students, especially from China. At public institutions, the foreign students pay the more expensive out-of-state tuition, usually without the discounts often available to [...]
A Matter of Priorities?—Obama Gives Jobs to Foreigners
ECONOMY, EAGLE FORUM In this video, Barack Obama is asked why we are importing foreign labor while Americans are out of work: Jennifer Wedel of Fort Worth asked why the government continues "to issue and extend H-1B visas when there are tons of Americans just like my husband with no job?" She was persistent and at one point broke in on the [...]
Trust Us; We’re the Government
Texas Straight Talk with Ron Paul While much has been made recently of the President's unconstitutional appointment of Richard Cordray to be director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), lost in the hubbub has been any discussion of the unconstitutionality of, or the need for, the CFPB itself. Proponents of the CFPB claim that [...]
Taxi Regulation and the Failure of Progressivism
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Samuel R. Staley As the American people head into another election year some will be puzzled by the rise and the staying power of Progressive ideals—according to which government manages the private economy supposedly for the social welfare. But in truth they’ve been operating at the local level for more [...]
Rep. Herger is Wrong About Agenda 21
BY HENRY LAMB California Representative Wally Herger offered an article on Agenda 21 which, unfortunately, reflects a lack of knowledge about Agenda 21 - shared by far too many elected officials. In the first instance, he said that Agenda 21 is a document developed at a U.N. Conference in 1993. Wrong! Agenda 21 was developed over a [...]
Bill Would End Corporate Welfare
U.S. SENATE, LEE.SENATE.GOV WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senators Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced the Energy Freedom & Economic Prosperity Act (EFEPA) to repeal all energy specific tax credits. The legislation is revenue neutral as it also requires a corresponding reduction in the corporate tax rate. U.S. [...]
Creating Jobs versus Creating Value
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Steven Horwitz Picking on New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is one of the largest participation sports on the Internet. And rightfully so, since he often says ridiculous things that demand a response from those who understand basic economics better than he does, despite his having won a Nobel Prize. His [...]
Strange Incentives in Federal Employment
BY CARL L. BANKSTON III Jordan Weissman has an interesting article in this month's Atlantic Magazine. Drawing on a new Congressional Budget Office study, Weissman notes that federal employees in general do slightly better than those in the private sector in wages and much better in benefits. The standard response to this type of finding is [...]
Federal Spending on Health Care Doubles in the Next Decade
ALYENE SENGER, HERITAGE.ORG The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its Budget and Economic Outlook for years 2012 to 2022 yesterday, and as Heritage’s Patrick Knudsen shows, the numbers add up to a dismal fiscal future. As the government continues its fiscal irresponsibility, 2012 will be the fourth straight year of trillion-dollar [...]
CFPB Wields New Powers with Director
DIANE KATZ, HERITAGE FOUNDATION Within hours of Richard Cordray assuming the role of director at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), agency officials began exercising their newly expanded powers. Their immediate target is all manner of “nonbank” financial services used by millions of households. While proponents contend that [...]
The Euro: The Folly of Political Currency
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Robert P. Murphy The financial markets continue to surge and collapse based on the latest news from Europe. As of this writing, the big events are Slovakia’s unwillingness to contribute to a bailout fund and the failure of Dexia, a French-Belgian bank with assets of almost $700 billion. As the sovereign [...]
Trends in Household Income Inequality
CARL L. BANKSTON III Inequality is in the news these days. I think most of the evidence suggests that incomes in the United States are indeed more unequally distributed than in the past. However, I also think that it is a mistake to attribute the trend toward greater disparities in income to deregulation or, indeed, to any of the policies of [...]
State Mandated Thinking
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Peter McAllister Is this statement true? “If SpongeBob SquarePants is the mayor of Minneapolis, then Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo.” It is. On the other hand, this is not: “If Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo, then Spongebob Squarepants is the Mayor of Minneapolis.” Confused? Welcome [...]
Budget Outlook Getting Worse, CBO Report Shows
PATRICK LOUIS KNUDSEN The figures released today by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) once again reflect the magnitude of the federal government’s fiscal problem and the urgent need for Congress and the President to address it. Some key points: The 2012 deficit, projected at $1.079 trillion, represents the fourth consecutive year of [...]
A Higher Education Revolution
Mike Brownfield, Heritage Foundation Speaking on Friday at the University of Michigan, President Obama declared, “I want this to be a big, bold, generous country where everybody gets a fair shot, everybody is doing their fair share, everybody is playing by the same set of rules. That’s the America I know. That’s the American I want to [...]
Are the British Practicing “Austerity”?
DAVID WEINBERGER, HERITAGE.ORG Some prominent left-wing commentators have devoted weekly columns and blogs to the notion that Great Britain has misguidedly pursued harsh spending “austerity” and that doing so has left the country lingering in unnecessary anguish. In the opinion pages of The New York Times, Paul Krugman inveighs [...]
Failed Fed Policies Prolong the Agony
Texas Straight Talk with Ron Paul The Federal Reserve's interest rate price-setting board, the FOMC, met last week. They will continue to set the federal funds rate at well below 1%, and plan to keep it low until the end of 2014. That's a year and half longer than they planned when they met just last month. Chairman Bernanke says they [...]
Morning Bell: Right to Work Heads to Indiana
MIKE BROWNFIELD, HERITAGE.ORG In 22 states in the Union, workers have the freedom under “Right-to-Work” laws to decide whether or not to pay union dues, and now Indiana is poised to become the twenty-third state on that list, bringing the workers there renewed hope in an economy that has seen few glimmers of light. Last week, Indiana’s [...]
Scribecast: Kevin Chavous on His Tireless Efforts for School Choice
LACHLAN MARKAY, HERITAGE FOUNDATION Few legislators have done more to advance school choice than Kevin Chavous. As a city councilmember in Washington D.C. from 1992 to 2004, and a chairman of the council’s Education Committee, Chavous was instrumental in implementing the city’s landmark Opportunity Scholarship Program. A partnership [...]
Working Into the Grave
BY ALAN CARUBA Believe it or not, there was a time when, if you turned 65 and retired, you could expect to live in reasonable comfort. Social Security covered a portion of your expenses; your savings account yielded a modest amount of interest, and, if you had made investments, stock dividends provided a safety cushion. Not so [...]
The Truth About Mitt Romney’s Taxes
MIKE BROWNFIELD, HERITAGE FOUNDATION How many times should your money be taxed? One time? Two times? Three times? Four? Sounds like a ridiculous proposition, but that's the true story of capital gains taxes in America, and it's one that's not being told in the continuing debate over Governor Mitt Romney's taxes. For more than a week, the [...]
Putting Useless Government Requirements to Rest
Minnesota Entrepreneur Challenges Requirement That All Funeral Homes Must Have an Embalming Room ECONOMIC LIBERTY, INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE Arlington, Va.—May the government force entrepreneurs to do useless things, like build extra rooms in their stores that they do not need and will never use, just to prove they are serious about their [...]
The Problem with Privatization
It's about competition. STEVEN HORWITZ, THE FREEMAN Classical liberals commonly favor “privatization” of many government activities. Their case, of course, is that the private sector would provide goods and services at lower cost and of higher quality than government can. Since classical liberals are right about this, why do I think [...]
Obama’s State of Omission
Mike Brownfield, Heritage Foundation Speaking last night from the U.S. Capitol, President Barack Obama described the state of the Union as he sees it — strong and getting stronger, with future growth fueled by his pursuit of progressive policies and an expansion of government, all architected to bring about his brand of “fairness.” The [...]
Two Kinds of Government Failure
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sandy Ikeda We use the term “government failure” to refer to interventions that systematically make things worse than they were before; where the cure is somehow worse than the disease. To those of us who study interventionism, however, there are actually two meanings of government failure. Two [...]
Taxing Investment
ROY CORDATO, THE FREEMAN In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was an economist at the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation, my boss and tax policy mentor, the late Norman Ture, had a favorite saying: “People aren’t taxed. Activities are.” It is this proposition, that taxation of any kind always has the effect of [...]
Degrees and Unemployment
CARL BANKSTON III A recent article in Fiscal Times (1) reported that recent college graduates with degrees in architecture had the highest unemployment rate, a fact that the periodical attributed to the housing crash. I did my own calculations on unemployment rates among college graduates under 30, which is not exactly the same as recent [...]
The Internet Dodges the SOPA Bullet — for Now
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Last week the acronyms SOPA and PIPA were unheard of, much less decipherable, by most people. Yet the other day a groundswell of opposition to them, led by Wikipedia, Google, and other Internet entities, was powerful enough to persuade a significant number of members of Congress to abandon [...]
Why School Tuition Is So Expensive: A Lesson In Opportunity Cost
BY DIEGO LUCERO It's the beginning of the year again, and students are filling the halls of universities and colleges across the United States. Touted as essential to the "American Experience," students are leaving their homes at the advisement of parents to pursue their educations. It can be said that in today's world, there is almost nothing [...]
How Well Off is the Average American Today?
ECONOMY, CARL L. BANKSTON III We are currently in a time of economic troubles and many Americans are indeed out of work or experiencing financial difficulties. The relative extent of these difficulties can be overestimated, though. If we look, for example, at the report (1) Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: [...]
Putting Useless Government Requirements to Rest
ECONOMIC LIBERTY, INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE Arlington, Va.—May the government force entrepreneurs to do useless things, like build extra rooms in their stores that they do not need and will never use, just to prove they are serious about their business? That issue is at the center of a major lawsuit filed today, January 19, 2012, in Minnesota [...]
Republican Presidential Candidates Embrace Medicare Premium
Rob Bluey, Heritage Foundation Earlier this week in New Hampshire, Republican presidential candidates touted the benefits of a Medicare premium support system — the approach to entitlement reform embraced by House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) and The Heritage Foundation. Ryan’s recent partnership with Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) helped [...]
Congress Asks the Right Question but Offers the Wrong Answer
Paul Rosenzweig, Heritage Foundation The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) are well-intentioned House and Senate proposals aimed at stopping the theft of intellectual property through foreign-based websites. Intellectual property is a critical and important form of property. The Framers understood that well enough to [...]
On the Road for America’s Future
Ed Feulner and Tony Perkins, Heritage Foundation The United States is at a crossroads. Over the course of the next 10 months, Americans will watch as the future of our country is debated — state by state, county by county, and town by town. In the 2012 presidential election, voters will make a fundamental decision that will have vast [...]
EPA Abuses
Texas Straight Talk with Ron Paul Last week the Supreme Court heard arguments in Sackett v. EPA, a case of blatant federal agency overreach and abuse of private property rights. Without any proof or reason, and no chance for appeal, the Environmental Protection Agency determined that a small single home lot was a “protected wetland.” The [...]
An Internet Blackout Over SOPA and PIPA
Mike Brownfield, Heritage Foundation As of midnight, Wikipedia is shut down for 24 hours, and hundreds of other popular websites have gone dark right along with it. They are standing together in protest of two controversial pieces of legislation that threaten Internet security and undermine the freedom of speech all in an effort to crack down [...]
The Keynesian Cure for Hunger: Eat More
RICHARD W. FULMER, THE FREEMAN Sylvia Nasar, author of New York Times bestseller, A Beautiful Mind, has a new book: Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius, which reviews the lives and ideas of a dozen economists from Marx to Keynes and Hayek to India’s Amartya Sen. It begins with a description of life in Jane Austen’s England [...]
So You Think You’re Free?
MIKE BROWNFIELD, HERITAGE FOUNDATION So you think you’re free? Thanks to big government spending and exploding debt, the United States — and indeed the world — is less economically free today than it was a year ago, according to the 18th annual Index of Economic Freedom, released yesterday by The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street [...]
Life-Changing Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY, ROBERT L. WOODSON, SR., HERITAGE.ORG The greatest tribute to the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., is not to name a street in his honor or celebrate a national holiday. It is to recognize and support those who are working to carry out his vision, those who empower those facing the greatest obstacles through personal [...]
Comment on the “Too Many People in College” Debate
CARL L. BANKSTON III The website “Minding the Campus” features a debate between George Leef and Peter Sacks on the question “Are Too Many People Going to College?” (1) Leef answers “yes” to this question and Sacks answers “no.” Leef and Sacks really seem to be arguing whether policymakers, using public funds and rhetorical [...]
Austrian Economics Hits the Headlines
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman When a presidential candidate declares, as Ron Paul has, “We’re all Austrians now,” it’s inevitable that his critics would try to discredit him – whether they understand what he’s talking about or not. That’s what Matthew Yglesias does in his Slate piece “What Is ‘Austrian [...]
