Tag: Capitalism
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Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer saves us from covered wagons
Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer believes that without government oversight and planning of our economy, Wichita would revert back to the way it was at its founding.
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Downtown Wichita Arena TIF District
Remarks to Wichita City Council, August 5, 2008. When I’ve been talking to people in Wichita, I find there is great confusion about the way that TIF districts work. This confusion serves to obfuscate what really happens with TIF districts: the TIF developers get to use their own property taxes to pay for things that…
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Wichita and the Old Town Warren Theater Loan
Remarks to be delivered to the Wichita City Council, July 1, 2008. Mr. Mayor and members of the Council, we are potentially beginning a journey down a road where there are two classes of businesses in Wichita. There are business owners who seek to earn their profit through market entrepreneurship, that is, by meeting the…
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Everything you love you owe to capitalism
This is an excellent article by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. An excerpt: I’m convinced that Mises was right: the most important step economists or economic institutions can take is in the direction of public education in economic logic. There is another important factor here. The state thrives on…
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The Entrepreneur As American Hero
Here’s Williams’ law: Whenever the profit incentive is missing, the probability that people’s wants can be safely ignored is the greatest. If a poll were taken asking people which services they are most satisfied with and which they are most dissatisfied with, for-profit organizations (supermarkets, computer companies and video stores) would dominate the first list…
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I, Pencil: A Most Important Story
I, Pencil is one of the most important and influential writings that explain the necessity for limited government. A simple object that we may not give much throught to, the story of the pencil illustrates the importance of markets, and the impossibility of centralized economic planning.
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The Value of the Businessman
An outstanding feature of the open market is the businessman, whose success or failure depends entirely on his ability to “focus on consumer needs” and so combine existing and potential factors of production to serve consumers most efficiently. The only constructive role government can play under the free market method of overcoming poverty is to…
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The Mystery of Capital
The problem with most third world countries, Mr. De Soto tells us, is not that there is no capital, it’s that the capital is dead. Dead in the sense that it can’t be used to its full economic potential. It can’t be mortgaged, it can’t be divided into shares, and it simply can’t be used…
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Tax increment financing in Iowa
Readers of The Voice For Liberty in Wichita are well aware that I believe that when the government provides subsidies to businesses — either in the form of cash payments or preferential tax treatment — we create a corrosive business environment. Government picks winners and losers for political reasons, rather than letting the market decide…