‘Sheldon Richman’ 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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The Mobility Gap: What Does It Mean?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman “Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe.” That’s how the New York Times began a page-one news story yesterday. It is a thoughtful story that offer a variety of explanations — some of them mitigating — for the so-called [...]
Social Cooperation, Part 2
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Last month I wrote about Ludwig von Mises’s emphasis on social cooperation as the basis of his economic philosophy, particularly in his magnum opus, Human Action. I thought I’d follow up with more thoughts on this subject. Mises was no maverick in this regard. Interest in social [...]
Elizabeth Warren’s Non Sequitur
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Elizabeth Warren, who’s running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, made quite a splash on the Internet with remarks to supporters in which she said: There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: [...]
Fearing Hayek
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman I’m sensing some panic in the air. Certain people seem mighty concerned that other people are . . . discovering Hayek. As a W. S. Gilbert character might say, Oh horror! Economics and business reporter David Warsh is getting much attention for suggesting that F. A. Hayek, far from being [...]
Indefinite Detention and the Free Society
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Permit me to state the obvious: The government shouldn’t be allowed to imprison people indefinitely without charge or trial. It shouldn’t be necessary to say this nearly 800 years after the Magna Carta was signed and over 200 years after the Fifth Amendment was ratified. Yet this [...]
Putting Bureaucracy First: Rachel Maddow’s Progressivism
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Progressives today say people should come before profits. Now in a privilege-ridden corporate state, that’s a worthy goal, though Progressives have no clue how to achieve it. How nice it would be if they were equally committed to putting people before bureaucracy. Here they fall down rather [...]
Back to Basics
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Note: I wrote this for the December 2002 issue of The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty, before I inaugurated TGIF in 2006. I repost it today especially for readers who never ran across it before. Lately I’ve landed in discussions about whether there is such a thing as human action. I’m not [...]
Progressive Intolerance
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Television pundits increasingly express an attitude that is at once arrogant and ignorant: The people who oppose Keynesian economics—specifically an increase in government deficit spending to create jobs and jumpstart the economy—are the same kind of people who also believe that the earth [...]
They’re Not Insulting Our Mothers
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman The last thing I wish to do is wade into the morass of income statistics to ascertain if the rich are really getting richer while the rest of us are getting poorer. We’ve all heard the line about “lies, damned lies, and statistics” (though we don’t know who first said it), and [...]
Destroying Value
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman In Cleveland and other American cities, homes are being demolished because in the current economy there is nothing better to do with them. Therein lies a lesson in Austrian business cycle theory. In a world of uncertainty, waste — the destruction of value — is inevitable. Human action, [...]
The New Fed
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman “Things are seldom what they seem.” —W. S. Gilbert, “H.M.S. Pinafore” Nowhere is this more true than in government, which means we have to watch it closely. Unfortunately preconceived notions can make us impervious to events right in front of us and lead us to colossal [...]
Occupying Wall Street
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman The Occupy Wall Street protest that began two weeks ago has not yet brought New York’s financial district to a halt — or gotten much media attention outside New York for that matter. At most, only a few hundred protesters have been on the scene. (Protests in other cities have been [...]
Of Malice and Straw Men
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman We libertarians must be onto something. Why else would critics work so hard to construct straw men to demolish rather than contending with our actual arguments? Right from the top you could tell that Stephen Metcalf’s blast in Slate would be no different. “Liberty Scam” featured [...]
Elizabeth Warren’s Non Sequitur
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman If you spend any time on a social network, you’re bound to come across this video of Elizabeth Warren, who’s running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. In her remarks she says: There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for [...]
Depression, War, and Recovery
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman In a recent mini-debate on the radio with a Keynesian economist, I ran into the increasingly popular claim that massive spending during World War II ended the Great Depression. (Listen to my response here.) In an odd way this is progress. If it took World War II to end the Depression, that [...]
Affording It All
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman People who don’t understand—or who don’t care about—economics say funny things. Well, they would be funny if they weren’t so damaging when translated into government policy. Take Lawrence O’Donnell, host of MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. He must be a smart guy. [...]
Ponzi Unmasked
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Texas governor and Republican presidential aspirant Rick Perry stirred up a fuss when he impolitely called Social Security “a Ponzi scheme.” Was he right? Ponzi schemes, which appear to be investment programs, have two elements. First, no investment actually takes place. People are [...]
Social Cooperation, Part 2
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Ludwig von Mises’s emphasis on social cooperation as the basis of his economic philosophy, particularly in his magnum opus, Human Action. I thought I’d follow up with more thoughts on this subject. Mises was no maverick in this regard. Interest in [...]
Progressive Intollerance: Talking to Themselves
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Television pundits increasingly express an attitude that is at once arrogant and ignorant: The people who oppose Keynesian economics – specifically a massive increase in government deficit spending to create jobs and jumpstart the economy – are the same kind of people who also believe [...]
Medical Consumers or Wards of the State?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Paul Krugman wants to know: “How did it become normal, or for that matter even acceptable, to refer to medical patients as ‘consumers’?” Let’s concede for argument’s sake there is something unattractive about viewing patients as consumers. Krugman writes, “Medical care, after [...]
The Debt Sky
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Since the sky is now apparently the limit, I rechristen the debt ceiling “the debt sky.” But seriously — no, that was serious. The Washington Times reported Wednesday: U.S. debt shot up $239 billion on Tuesday — the largest one-day bump in history — as the government flexed the [...]
Bondholders and Victims
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman The raging debt limit controversy raises myriad moral issues that are of interest to libertarians but hardly anyone else. It is assumed almost universally that the U.S. government must make its interest payment and cover its other financial obligations on August 3, the day after the [...]
Taxation Is Still Robbery
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Whether President Obama and congressional Republicans can work out a deal to let the government to borrow even more (!) money seems to hang on whether the latter will go for increased in tax revenues. So far, thank goodness, it looks like no new revenues. Following the zigzagging [...]
About that Debt Limit
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman What’s the point of a debt ceiling if raising it is a mere formality? As the U.S. government neared its $14.29 trillion debt limit, the congressional vote to raise it was expected to be uncontroversial. That’s pretty much how it’s been in the past. In the first decade of this century, [...]
Default in the Future
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman The on-and-off discussions in Washington over how – not whether – to raise the debt ceiling and reduce future budget deficits have long passed the point of farce. Watching the politicians’ antics, one wonders why anybody ever thought they (or their predecessors) could be trusted [...]
Of Malice and Straw Men
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman We libertarians must be on to something. Why else would critics work so hard to construct straw men to demolish rather than contending with our actual arguments? Right from the top, you could tell that Stephen Metcalf’s blast in Slate would be no different. “Liberty Scam” featured [...]
Obama’s Economics Lesson
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman President Obama apparently thinks that until the latest recession, no business realized it might reduce its workforce by substituting machines and other high-tech devices. When asked by NBC’s Ann Curry why he hasn’t been able to convince business owners to hire more people (as if the [...]
Affording It All
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman People who don’t understand — or who don’t care about — economics say funny things. Well, they would be funny if they weren’t so damaging when translated into government policy. Take Lawrence O’Donnell, host of MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. He must be a [...]
Slave Labor and Intellectual Property
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman The libertarian challenge to the legitimacy of “intellectual property” has created some confusion. It’s understandable. For one thing, there’s an apparent inconsistency: If one favors property rights in tangible things, why not in intangibles? Pro-property IP opponents reply that [...]
Lawless Government
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Everyone pays lip service to the rule of law. Indeed I’ve never heard of anyone rejecting it as undesirable. (It has been called impossible under prevailing circumstances but that is a different point.) So why is the principle so flagrantly violated with almost no public outrage? Take [...]
Had Enough Yet?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Regarding the looming fiscal disaster, it’s best to keep one’s eyes on the forest and not get lost in the trees. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the numbers, but one thing looks certain: Most everyone understands the current situation is unsustainable in the ruling [...]
End the IMF
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman It’s a topsy-turvy world. “Anarchists” protest cuts in government spending, while “socialists” live in the lap of luxury, including $3,000-a-night Manhattan hotel suites, working, in at least one celebrated case, to impose corporatist-flavored “neoliberalism” on the troubled [...]
About Those Oil Company Tax Breaks
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Whether or not one has a warm cozy feeling about big oil companies, one should be troubled by the government’s power to issue selective “tax breaks” and to rescind them whenever politicians need the money. You won’t catch me saying anything nice about any tax, but I reserve a [...]
Budget-Cutting Resistance
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman So here’s the problem: While polls show that people want the government’s budget deficit and the national debt reduced, they don’t want the biggest spending items cut. Some numbers: In the latest ABC-Washington Post poll (April 17), 59 percent said that the deficit should reduced [...]
Saving the Warfare-Welfare State: Sheldon Richman
The difference is over means not ends Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Why does everyone think Washington is plagued by excessive partisanship? The contest over how to address the fiscal debacle says otherwise: Both divisions of the uniparty (Democrat and Republican) agree that the warfare-welfare state must be saved. [...]
Had Enough Yet?
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman The last couple of TGIF columns focused on the trees — some victims of government action — rather than the forest – Leviathan itself. Today’s topic – the looming fiscal disaster – is a case in which concentrating on the trees can lead one to miss the forest altogether. After [...]
A Victim of the State, pt. 2
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Is it a criminal offense to irritate a U.S. attorney? Apparently so. If the case of Siobhan Reynolds is any indication, it’s a serious offense that can cost a person a lot of money as well as her freedom to speak in public — without ever being charged with a conventional crime. That’s [...]
A Revolutionary for All Seasons
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman If it hasn’t been done already, I hope someone is translating Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (particularly part 2) into Arabic. People rising up against dictators throughout the Middle East and North Africa should be reading that book; it will come in handy when they’ve driven the [...]
Free the Children, Cut the Budget
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Pundits like David Brooks of the New York Times lament that the deficit-cutting mood supposedly sweeping the United States is myopically targeting education in favor of more powerful constituencies. “If you look across the country, you see education financing getting sliced — often in [...]
Wisconsin Labor Brouhaha
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman That’s quite a row going on in Wisconsin. The new governor, elected without the support of most government-employee unions, has proposed to cut back the scope of collective bargaining for most state workers. Scott Walker says the budget measure is needed to save money as well as government [...]
There’s Got to Be a Better Way
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman What’s so remarkable about events in the Middle East is that a significant number of people who had felt powerless looked around at what they’d seen every day of their lives and thought for the first time: “It doesn’t have to be like this.” When will Americans do that? I know the [...]
What Egyptians Are Teaching the World
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman In Egypt the powers that be continue to defy the peaceful throngs in the streets. Yet their rulers’ clumsy efforts to mollify the courageous people remind us of something usually overlooked about the nature of political power, namely, that ideas, not force, ultimately rule, for as Jeffrey [...]
Obama’s Corporatist Big Plans
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Win the future. What did Barack Obama mean when he uttered those ridiculous words in some form more than ten times during his State of the Union speech? Was it just an exhortation or does it have actual content? If “we” – who exactly? – are to win the future, does everyone else have [...]
“What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear”
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman I took that title from volume 2, section 4, chapter 6 of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1840). Considering what has been happening legislatively (and not just in the last year-plus), it seems like a good time to revisit Tocqueville’s writing about democratic despotism. He [...]
Wrong Questions
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Fifty years ago yesterday, John F. Kennedy said those words during his inauguration as president. It is undoubtedly the best-known line from any American inaugural address, except perhaps for FDR’s “he [...]
Value, Cost, Marginal Utility, and Bohm-Bawerk
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Does cost of production determine price or does price determine cost of production? In the world of economic caricatures, the classical economists (Smith, Ricardo, et al.) took the former position, the Austrians the latter. Specifically, the Austrian view supposedly is that that demand driven [...]
The Importance of Subjectivism in Economics
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman After many years, Frédéric Bastiat remains a hero to libertarians. No mystery there. He made the case for freedom and punctured the arguments for state socialism with clarity and imagination. He spoke to lay readers with great effect. Bastiat loved the market economy, and badly wanted it [...]
