‘Sheldon Richman’ Archives
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 [...]
A Boost for the Managed Economy
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Nowhere is it easier to miss the forest for the trees than in discussions of government policy. For the past week the media have been saturated with debates over the “compromise” tax package agreed to by Barack Obama and congressional Republicans. The package passed by the House and [...]
A Free Market in Banking? Not Even Close
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman How close are we to having a free market in the United States — and does it matter? This issue came up briefly in a recent installment of the excellent podcast series “EconTalk,” when George Mason University professor Russ Roberts interviewed Australian economist John Quiggin, author of [...]
Trading For Security
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Americans tolerate a costly global national-security apparatus in part because they believe the country would be economically vulnerable without it. After all, we use resources from all over the world—oil being only the most prominent example. What if an embargo cut us off from [...]
The Many Impositions of the State
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman Not that I’m keeping score, but just in the last few weeks the news has overflowed with examples of how much we are the mercy of government edicts. The three stories I’m thinking of, quite unrelated on the surface, are: the spreading but so far futile protests against body scans and [...]
Help for the Downtrodden Corporate Exporter
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman The present occupant of the White House made quite a splash on his trip to India when he announced that 50,000 American jobs would be created thanks to $15 billion in U.S. export contracts. We’ll ignore Barack Obama’s grab at credit for these deals. Rupa Subramanya Dehejia of India Real [...]
Budget Mice
Free Enterprise Zone, The Freeman, Sheldon Richman So, we’ve made it through another election. Obama euphoria is gone, and control of the House of Representatives has gone to the opposition wing of the uniparty. The deficit-spenders and high taxers have been partly displaced by the cutters. Or that’s what we’re supposed to believe. What [...]
