Freeman

Individualism Clashes with Cooperation? It Just Ain't So!

Brooks protests that "a tide of research" in the human and social sciences has demonstrated that Goldwater's oldfashioned individualist notions aren't supported by the latest empirical evidence because, Brooks tells us, human beings are social creatures by nature, closely intertwined with each other in the fabric of a shared social life. (Apparently the failure to provide a convincing rationale for government bailouts of big business is supposed to be a problem for individualism, not a probl...

Raw Milk and the Sour State

In a time when milk collection and storage on large-scale farms was unsan- itary and unrefrigerated (and when additives as diverse as marigold petals and animal brains were placed in milk to add body), pasteurization helped save lives. [...] people were willing to pay for it. According to the Weston A. Price Foundation, a leading natural-foods organization, raw milk reduces the incidence of asthma, eczema, and hay fever in children.

Poker and the Free Market

Poker and the Free Market [...] recently I was a director and the chairman of the audit committee of one of Bermuda's banks, but I lived with a guilty secret, almost the equivalent of being an alcoholic or, even worse, a smoker.

Liquid Lies

A woman with Chanel perfume in her carryon laughed at the idea of entrusting it to her checked bag since that would give the TSA's baggage screeners a crack at it, while another admitted to sneaking body lotion onboard. [...] their neighbors and friends agreed that these were fine, upstanding folks, not radical ideologues. [...] passengers pay the price, not only in the fees and taxes that allow the TSA to perpetrate this scam, but also in long lines and lost time, aggravation, frustration,...

Michael Oakeshott On Rationalism in Politics

[...] he sees the depend- ence of theory on practice as being so unavoidable that not only is the rationalist incapable of skillful perform- ances guided solely by theory, he is not even able to stick to his purported guidelines while performing poorly. [...] it offers a complementary but still significantly different critique of planning to those of Mises and Hayek.

Gun Control: An Economic Analysis

[...] when there are myriad substitutes to the same end - driving, taking the bus, taking the subway, riding a bike, walk- ing, running, hitchhiking, skateboarding, roller skating, riding a motorcycle, riding a horse - eliminating a sin- gle means does not preclude the acting individual from achieving that end. [...] this could be done several times in short order, driving at high speed into a crowd outside one building and then leaving the scene in order to do it again outside another build...

Taxation As Vandalism

Why, he asks himself, should the proprietors of these two stores, who (he presumes) spent comparable amounts of time and money in building their businesses, be separated by a large and growing disparity in their wealth and consequently their living conditions? The United States is moving dangerously close to (and has maybe even arrived at) a system under which those charged with protecting and trusted to honor our rights regularly violate them in the name of mindless rhetorical utopianism an...

In Praise of Educational Pluralism

Isn't it odd that our greatest successes in learning to live together stem not from agreeing on what is correct but from agreeing to let people decide for themselves? For far too long we have ignored the possibility that in a society which embraces freedom of belief, religion, and expression, it is best to respect people's freedom to decide for themselves how they want their children educated. [...] for the rest of us, it is clear that the only fair and equitable solution to the differences ...

Capital Letters

[...] for most of the nineteenth century, at a time of great industrial and agricultural expansion, prices declined. (My excuse: I left it out to keep the article from growing too long.) If, as you rightly point out about the nineteenth century, the output of goods and services grows more rapidly than the money supply properly should grow, then prices should gradually decrease, and that decrease would be perfectly consistent with a healthy economy.

Beth A. Hoffman, 1950-2008

Ideas And Consequences

A Man Who Knew the Value of Life and Liberty

Ngor's Oscar-winning performance in The Killing Fields gave him a platform to tell the world about the mass murder that occurred between 1975 and 1979 in Cambodia at the hands of the Khmer Rouge communists. In the warped minds of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge hierarchy, the "evils" they aspired to destroy included all vestiges of the former governments of Cambodia: city life, private enterprise, the family unit, religion, money, modern medicine and industry, private property, and anything that...

Our Economic Past

Nixon's New Economic Plan

According to his economic adviser Herbert Stein, he "tended to worry exceedingly about his reelection prospects and so to feel impelled to extreme measures to assure his reelection." Union leaders, big businessmen, members of Congress, potential presidential candidates in the next election, high-ranking economists in the treasury department, even Federal Reserve Board chairman Arthur Burns - all prodded the president to impose an "incomes policy" because, as Burns put it, "the rules of econo...

Book Reviews

Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class

How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class by Robert H. Frank University of California Press * 2007 * 160 pages * $19.95 Reviewed by Alan Reynolds Robert Frank, a professor of economics at Cornell, has long argued that affluent Americans spend too much on conspicuous consumption, which he relabels "positional" goods. Frank has spent many years writing books and devising phrases to remind us that he disapproves of status symbols (Luxury Fever, 1999), overpaid superstars (TAp Winner Take All...

Opening the Floodgates: Why America Needs to Rethink Its Borders and Immigration Law

[...] more to the point, there is no reason to believe that any harm comes to us when different peoples settle here. [...] he says, recent immigrants seem to be "assimilating" just fine. If we had open borders, he says that "business" would gain but low-paid workers would lose because of added competition in the labor market. [...] he advocates taxation to compel the supposed winners to pay the supposed losers.

Economic Facts and Fallacies

First is Sowell's discussion of four core fallacies we frequently encounter in public-policy discussions: the zero-sum fallacy (ignoring that voluntary economic arrangements are positive-sum); the fallacy of composition (particularly that robbing Peter to pay Paul benefits society simply because it benefits Paul); the chess-piece fallacy (assuming that some authority can achieve desired results as though he were moving chessmen on a board, ignoring people's desires and incentives); and the op...

The War Between the State and the Family: How Government Divides and Impoverishes

Morgan sums up the implications of all this on the size and intrusiveness of government: "Growing family and household fragmentation" drives government spending and taxes ever higher; increases the "number of clients of the state"; "displaces existing institutional and private arrangements"; places the government in the role of parent and provider to children; allows for increased government intrusions into family Ufe; and generates "an increasing mass of legislation and regulation of provisi...

Perspective

Theory and Crisis

What might be even more distressing than the current buildup of the corporate state in response to the supposed economic crisis is the way some self-styled advocates of the free market are willing to cast aside the economic theory they once claimed to embrace. If you asked a TARP advocate why the intervention is necessary, he might say that when the government borrows $700 billion in order to buy banks' bad mortgage-backed securities or shares of stock, it will inject liquidity into the cred...

The Pursuit Of Happiness

How Bad Can It Get?

Because the unions are permitted to force govern- ment employees to pay union dues and agency fees as a condition of continued employment, they are able to buy the loyalty of the governor and to bribe enough legislators to vote yes on the bargains. According to the Wall Street Journal, Colorado government unions assembled over $13 million of forced dues and fees to fight a ballot measure that would have prohibited them from collecting forced dues and fees. According to the Court, Congress i...

Thoughts On Freedom

On the Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle, Part I

Workers hired in the expectation that the factory would be built and operated will be laid off. Because newly created money usually enters the economy through the banking system, monetary expansion typically does indeed push the nominal rate of interest below the real rate.

Peripatetics

Bailing Out Statism

A distortion occurs when government planners and rent-seeking corporate allies, under cover of humanitarian social policy, engineer a deviation from natural market outcomes. Dressed up as promotion of the American Dream through home ownership, the planners used political means - ultimately, the threat to imprison uncooperative taxpayers - to channel wealth to the construction, real-estate, and financial industries. The primary instruments of this social engineering were Fannie Mae, created as...

Give Me A Break!

What Happened to Market Discipline?

During the late presidential campaign Barack Obama said, "[Today's economic problems are] a stark reminder of the failures of ... an economic philosophy that sees any regulation at all as unwise and unnecessary." Moral hazard - the poisonous mix of private profits and taxpayer-covered losses - is what you get when politicians indulge their hubris to redesign society. The MFI will supervise the sale of loan assets at market prices and purchase them as necessary (emphasis added).