Tag: Economics
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Our Economic Past — Equality, Markets, and Morality
Free markets may yield odd results and certainly unequal outcomes, but the greater opportunities and prosperity have made the tradeoff worthwhile for American society. From Our Economic Past ~ Equality, Markets, and Morality by Burton Folsom, Jr., posted at the Foundation for Economic Education.
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Dry-Cleaning Economics in One Lesson
The Foundation for Economic Education reports that an American clothes hanger company has succeeded in persuading the government to slap a tariff on its foreign competitors. Who wins? …the tariff is expected to cost some $212,765 for each of the 564 jobs saved. … The lesson is that the misguided attempt to save jobs for…
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Wall Street Crisis Fruit of Government, Not Free Markets
Radley Balko writing about the activities of the United States Government in Reason Magazine: Many commenters have blamed all of this on capitalism. This isn’t capitalism. It’s a peculiar kind of corporatist socialism, where good risks and the resulting profits remain private, but bad risks and the resulting losses are passed on to taxpayers. There’s…
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Bailout Raises Libertarians’ Market Value
“The specter of the most titanic intervention in the markets since Franklin Roosevelt started sewing the safety net has folks at the Cato Institute reaching for something strong.” See Bailout Raises Libertarians’ Market Value in the Washington Post. Also from the Cato Institute: Because of their quasi-governmental status, there is a market perception that Fannie…
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Rotten Paper, Toxic Paper
Pat Buchanan’s take on the current financial crisis. See Day of Reckoning.
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Free market economists weigh in on Paulson’s plan
Reason Magazine asks free-market economists their opinion of the proposed bailout plan, and collects their results. Click here to read this excellent article.
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The Bailout Reader
The Ludwig von Mises Institute has compiled The Bailout Reader, a collection of articles relevant to the current situation. Not all these articles are from the past few weeks, as Austrian economists have long understood the dangers of government interventionism, the fruits of which we see today. The events taking place in the financial market…
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Ron Paul’s Wisdom on the Current Financial Crisis
Ron Paul writes My Answer to the President, noting that the “financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived.” He introduces a quotation from Hayek this way: F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks? manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar.…
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Laissez faire in Washington? On what planet?
Sheldon Richman of the Foundation for Economic Education contributes analysis of the current economic situation in the article Government Failure. A few quotes: Laissez faire in Washington? On what planet? Governments at all levels have regulated the financial industry from the time of the founding. … At the Division of Labour blog, economist Lawrence H.…
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Wind Power: Why Special Tax Treatment?
A recent article in USA Today (Renewable energy firms clamor for tax breaks) reports on the uncertainty of whether the U.S. Congress will extend the tax credits that subsidize solar and wind power investment. From the article: Some $500 million in investment and production tax credits will expire Dec. 31 unless Congress renews them. Without…
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Kansas Climate Change Mitigation Will Be Costly
A recent presentation in Kansas revealed that fighting global warming in Kansas will be quite costly, and will harm lower-income families most. The Wichita Eagle article Business leaders hear climate talk reports that The National Association of Manufacturers calculated that cap-and-trade proposals before Congress would cost the average Kansas family $304 per month in the…
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Pickens’s Slim Economics
An article from the Foundation for Economic Education warns us to be cautious when considering the plans of oilman T. Boone Pickens: Pickens?s commercial no doubt causes FEE readers? classical-liberal antennae to stand at attention. The word “plan” alone rightly provokes worries of coercive schemes. The notion of being independent of energy or any other…